Esther Stories (11 page)

W
ALT USED TO STAND
outside the cemetery gates and smoke, because under some ancient law from the Talmud that he happily took advantage of, but never fully understood, he wasn’t permitted to enter cemeteries, because he, Walt Kaplan, was a Kohen, a genuine descendant of high Hebrew priests. Of course he got a bang out of being royalty. He used to go around sometimes licking his finger and anointing people duke of this, duchy of that, even called Alf Dolinsky “my liege.” When Dolinsky said that’s not Hebrew, Walt said even the pope doesn’t preach to his flock in Latin anymore. “Benevolent eminences like myself have to change with the times.” Once, during Sarah’s Aunt Ida’s graveside service—Ida was so old for so long that most people forgot she hadn’t died yet and were genuinely shocked when it happened—Walt put on one of those Burger King crowns and greeted people after the service with a gloved hand and a blessing, till Sarah whispered that if he didn’t take that thing off in two seconds she’d rip his head off. But it was also out there with his pack of Kools, in front of the gates, across the street from the gas station, that Walt would ruminate on all the time he was going to have to spend inside the gates, among those graves, inside a cheap casket from Gould’s. His status as a member of the Kohanim applied only to his living flesh; dead he was the same gone schlump as everybody else. And even on the day Ida was disappearing into that irregularly mowed grass forever (he could hear Rabbi Gruber intone his stock line: “We shall always remember the cheerful countenance of the deceased”), he couldn’t help comparing the time we spend there, and working the whole thing out in his head for the nine millionth time and thinking again: Nasty joke. Here’s your body. Now watch it die. Watching the crowd of mourners through the gates and wanting to shout that they all had it backward. Clowns, it’s us, the ones still paying taxes, who need some honoring. It’s the lucky stiffs in the ground—Ab Sisson, Teddy Marcowitz, Pearl Brodsky, Lou Jacobs, Hyman Sobiloff, and now even poor Ida—who should show more respect. They’re the ones who should be huddled and bundled and murmuring and remembering. They’re the ones who should be blowing snot in their hands. All Ida and the rest of the sleepers deserve is a handshake goodbye, maybe a peck on the cheek farewell, because for them it’s a simple matter of going away, of leaving, of forgetting keys, wallet, driver’s license, cash—an easy vamoose. You want sorrow? Out here! He wants to roar it at the backs of the mourners. Turn around! Out here beyond the gates, suckers! Turn around!

I
N THE DARK
she lights a match. She looks at herself in the reflection in the window. The flame is jumpy and fickle because she’s breathing on it. Yet it stays lit until it burns down to her fingers, and she watches herself in the uncertain light and sees a face too large and blanched, like an unwelcome moon. The house so still and mute even the kitchen clock’s terrible grinding is muffled. She’s downstairs in the new room, the TV room, the room they remodeled in the fifties. Walt’s upstairs muttering snores like a sea cow. It’s two o’clock in the morning and she whispers something even she can barely hear: “What for?” What her mother used to say, first thing she ever said in the mornings, even before her father got sick, as though asking it of God. “What for? You tell me what for?” Her mother who died of grief for a daughter who only ran away down the block. But why now? Why Sarah asking? She thinks of Rhoda’s tiny munching lips at her nipples, remembers those grabby little hands—in this very room—all that need. And now? It isn’t that. She doesn’t want that need back. It’s some other more undefined ache. Something else, like being haunted by the dying light of the match, by her love, by her desire even now to knead Walt’s skin, even now to whisper in his sleeping ear—what?—that she’s here, that Sarah’s here, whisper, I’m here, I’m here. Because so much is occurring to her tonight and she can’t sleep while the house drowses. Sarah lets the silence soak her into its blur, as if she were descending slowly through water. But she’s never in her life been capable of whispering, of capturing a windless moment, and she fears he doesn’t know this about her, that she can simply sit, in the dark, the radio off, and can, yes, can, consider that her life with him has been exactly that, a life, and life’s not something you measure in good or bad. Her life with Walt a life—and if she could simply say—but that’s not it either. He wouldn’t want to hear about it, would shrug her away. “Whatayou talkin? Sarah? Whatayou talkin?” No, she would like to do it with a look that doesn’t need explanation or interpretation, but instead would simply make him remember. He’s such a writer down of things, such a clutcher of nonsense; the man has files of pictures of furniture, of tables and chairs he sold thirty years ago, stuff already on a dump heap—but there are so many things he doesn’t remember, because he never thought about them when they were happening. A year and a half ago now his brother Leon died in her arms because his wife, Bets, couldn’t bear it any longer, and when Walt came into that white room he didn’t look at his brother. He looked at Sarah—pleaded with her, as if she were suddenly the God with answers her mother was always talking to—and he doesn’t remember, because he wasn’t there when it was happening, and even now, when he rambles on about himself and Leon making illegal whiskey in a cowshed—as if Fall River ever had a cowshed in the past hundred years, as if he ever drank illegal whiskey—it’s so he won’t remember anything he really remembers about a brother dying before him. Love, isn’t it enough to describe? What for? Remember you holding me and me holding your dead brother and your eyes searching mine for some answer and me giving the only answer I knew how to give, which was to grip both of you, the living and the dead, and then, yes—you won’t remember this because you weren’t there when it was happening. I dropped him on the pillow and gripped you harder, and you dug your head into the nook of my shoulder and you wept no. Your brother who died too young because he went to Florida, state full of nothing but oranges and corpses; the man should have known, you said—I dropped him on the bed and gripped you and you wept no and you’ll never remember.

S
ARAH COMES HOME
for lunch after her volunteer shift at the register in the hospital gift shop and finds Walt dead on the floor of their bedroom. He has been dead for at least two hours. His second and last heart attack, and from this one there was no turning back. The man turned fifty-nine only three months ago. This is September 1975. It has been a long morning, Friday mornings always are, and Sarah’s feet hurt. She kneels beside his body and lifts his wrist to check for his pulse, even though she knows from looking at him. She knows. The way she knows it’s morning through the thick drapes of a strange hotel room. The way she knows it’s bad news by the way the phone rings mid-ring. Walt is dead. He is too young. He is dead. He is on his back with his suit pants on, sprawled, as though he went with fight. He clutches his wallet in his left hand. His teeth are still good and white. His shoes are polished. His tie is crooked, but tight and confident up to his big Adam’s apple. He could be a toppled wax statue. He’s wearing his watch. His hands are not clammy. He’s wet himself. But still, he could be sleeping on the floor. He could be napping. He could have fallen, tripped, knocked his head against the telephone table and conked himself out. She rests an ear on his chest, not to listen for any movement of his dead exploded heart, but because she is suddenly so weary and he has been her fat pillow all these years. Though she doesn’t want to sleep. She wants to rest awake. She sits up and takes off her shoes, then settles her head on his chest again, on his blue sea horses tie, on his sprawl. It isn’t comfortable because of the angle, but she doesn’t adjust. She remains still and listens to her own breathing. A bit quickened, but not hysterical, nothing even close to that. Other women, she thinks, would get hysterical. Run around moaning, dial telephone numbers furiously, shriek. The fools, she thinks, showy fools. Dingbats, Walt would call them. Dingbat chickens bawk-bawking. Walt, she thinks, too many sirloins at the Magoni’s in Somerset. How many Howard Johnson hot dogs on a buttered bun? Ate, ate, ate like a happy hog across your life, and now I’m here. I could murder your head. You want to see tears? You want them to drop on your shirt so you can feel them on your skin? Didn’t I tell you that time in Atlantic City that you waddled like an old man, that you needed to rest too much. You couldn’t walk the boardwalk without getting so tired, and now look at you, Walt, can’t even make it to work. That time in Atlantic City you laughed at me and said who the hell needs walking anyway. Bought us both another double cone. Pounded your chest and said, You got to live while you live. And that was all well and good for you. You don’t have to come home to you like this. I have to come home to you. Walt. Atlantic City. Why Atlantic City now? That time in Atlantic City with Bernie and Nina Sadow. You on the beach. The only one of us who’d swim. Bernie had some kind of skin condition. Who knew with that man. It was always something. And God, that Nina. Didn’t stop talking to take a breath the three days we were down there. About what? You said you never heard so much nonsense since Saul Graboys talked you into buying his lemon El Dorado. But you swam, darling. Bernie with his skin condition and his chain of what? Check-cashing stores? Wasn’t that it? Didn’t Bernie Sadow own a chain of check-cashing stores in Newark? What a business to be in, no wonder he had a skin condition. You splashing and shouting at us. I stayed on the beach because I couldn’t escape Nina’s mouth. Bernie sitting there bundled up like it was February in Warsaw, and you, my fat brave knight, my tub-a-lard warrior, in the water splashing, throwing a tennis ball to those shouting boys. Those boys leaping out of the water like pale white porpoises. You swam with those boys. Why Atlantic City now? We haven’t spoken to Bernie and Nina Sadow in how many years? You came back and shook your hair at us girls and said to Nina, Stop jabbering, woman. Stop! Come on, deadbeats, it’s the Fourth of July in Atlantic City! Nina wanted to go back to the hotel and play cards. Bernie didn’t want to do anything but tell strangers on the beach about all his ailments, that straw hat pulled down to his eyes, that huge coat, those big sunglasses. You said he looked like your Russian great-aunt escaped from the shtetl, Aunt Portia Bertobobovitch. At least that got a smile out of Bernie, but Nina barely heard it over her own blather, except to say to me, Oh, your Walt’s so hysterical. He’s really got to be the most hysterical of all the husbands. Of all the husbands, she said, and for once, even though she went right back to complaining about the food at the hotel, for once that blathering woman had an ounce of wisdom. You said, Bernie, my big Polish babushka. And Bernie said, I thought you said I was Russian. Because Bernie had a sense of humor, which was more than you could say for Nina. And you said, Poland, Russia, it all looks the same to a Jew on the run, and Bernie, who was sensitive and serious on that point, didn’t laugh, only said, Indeed. And later in the hotel you stood up on the bed with Q-tips sticking out your ears and mimicked Bernie’s indeed. Indeed, indeed, indeed—who does he think he is, the queen’s mother? Because Bernie was always finding new ways to remind people that he went to Harvard. But check cashing? Harvard College, Harvard Yard, and that’s how he ended up making a living? Oh my lovely, my lovely, my lovely.

S
ARAH GOTTLIEB
leans against the passenger-side door of Walt Kaplan’s borrowed Ford Victoria. It’s a shutterthwacking Thursday morning in November 1938. Walt, clean-shaved, bandy-legged, stands on the sidewalk facing her, still not saying anything. So quiet now the only sound is the wind and the clack of the leaves somersaulting across bricks. Sarah is hefty, round-faced, and strong—mocking him with deviled eyes, tapping the toe of her high-heeled shoe on the running board of the car like a miniature hammer, her calf working, working. He’s also chubby, closer to all-out fat than she is; he makes a face when he sucks in his belly so that he can button his pants. Now he’s spreading his arms wide to form a huge bewildered Why? But still not speaking. Her face isn’t budging, so what’s the use of fighting back, of talking at her deaf ears. He grinds his teeth and involuntarily begs her name, mouths soundlessly, “Sarah.” She doesn’t bother to shake her head and certainly doesn’t need to use her voice to say no again. Her face: Never, never, never, never, never. What do I care? Plead all day. It’s still never, till hell freezes over and the goblins go ice-skating. Walt turns and looks at the pea-green house, sees the mother in the front window glaring. Which is worse, that ancient scowler or this hyena? Same face as the one in the window, only thicker and rosier. He wonders how a little flesh can make such a difference. That one in the window so far from beautiful he’d have to be chained and dragged to do the things that with this one he re-enacts in his head nightly, daily, afternoonly. He looks back at Sarah, who is now twirling a silver necklace around her pinkie. How could it have turned into this? She knows what we need to do. The paperwork’s filed. And didn’t she say three days ago that if she had to live in that putrid house another day she’d hang herself by the flagpole in front of Durfee High? Now he’s ready, everything’s ready, and here she is all done up and beautiful, lipstick and that hat, and all he can do is look daftly from her mouth to her knees, fat little knees he could eat without mustard. Because now it’s an unbudgeable no. Though it’s no more than twenty degrees, he’s sweating already in his new wool suit. Hasn’t opened his trap since he pulled the car up to the house and already sweating like his undershirted father ranting around the store. Except he’s here in broad daylight, on the sidewalk, pleading like the ignoramus she’s convinced him he is. Sarah continues to tap her feet, her little doomsday clock ticking, ticking, sucking up his courage by the gallon. And there’s nothing to say that he hasn’t begged for with his eyes already. That if she wants to run, he’ll run. That he’s got a car. (Yes, it’s his brother Leon’s, but at least till Sunday night it’s his.) Enough cash for the moment. A car and enough money. What else is there in this country? It’s never been a question of going very far. He has a decent job, and though the mother’s a witch, there are too many others in the family, too many friends; they can’t leave for good. Simply going away for a few days to make it all legal. But that feverish tap-tap-tapping, that face taunting him. He feels the mother’s eyes on the back of his head. Surrounded. Ambushed by women. Goddamnit, does he love this Sarah down to her shoes. God forgive him for wishing the mother a corpse already.

“Sare,” he says, though he hadn’t meant to. He’d meant to rehearse the final assault in his mind first, to get the sound right, somewhere in the gray between a bullyrag and a threat. But instead he only blurts, forcelessly, his voice octaves higher than he’s ever heard it, “Sare—”

Only then it comes:

“Awright already.”

Her voice, too, from somewhere other than her eyes and mouth, as though her throat rebelled before it could be hushed. A squeaked “Sare” answered by an irritated, but at the same time simple, unequivocal “Awright already.” Have ever more glorious words been spoken by a woman? That evil crone in the house must notice something in the way Walt’s shoulders go from clenched to juggly loose, because the next moment she’s kicking open the front door and shrieking. Sarah very nearly doesn’t have time to retrieve the little Samsonite she’s hidden in the bushes beside the house. What the mother screams at them, who knows amid the slamming doors and the flush of the Ford’s V-8? And their hyperventilating laughter, like two suddenly different people hurtling into that car. By the time the tiny shawled bundle of rage reaches the curb, Sarah and Walt are already sailing across Highland Avenue. To freedom, their first shared thought, as the car lunges forward, blurring houses, lawns, garages, a man raking leaves.

Left alone in front of the pea-green house, Frieda Gottlieb shouts at her staring neighbors, the frightened Portuguese housewives peering sneakily out their kitchen windows. Forever convinced that still, after generations, not one of the encroachers knows a single word of English, Frieda barks, like the schoolteacher she was a thousand years ago, “My daughter equals whore.” She snarls, “Daughter, whore. In English they mean the same thing.”

In the car they head toward Providence, Rhode Island, where the laws are easier. So long as you got a signed letter of consent from the marriageable woman to the court three days prior to the date of the proposed marriage, you could get a license in the morning, matrimony by afternoon. It was practically a money-back guarantee. You paid a little more than in Massachusetts, but the speed made up for that. Sarah’s practically asleep by the time they reach Tiverton. Her mouth is open and she’s breathing loudly, boisterously. Thirty-six miles from Fall River to Providence overland. Tiverton to Providence eighteen miles. Nine-thirty now. License by 11:00, married before 3:00 if the line’s not too long. In Rhode Island justices of the peace get paid by the marriage was what he’d heard, so they get you out of there with no dilly and no dally. After that, dinner at the Fore and Aft in Bristol. Then back to Providence to the Wachman Hotel, where Artie Shaw always stays when he’s in town. And then
Arrivederci,
nature! He swoops a breath.
Hasta luego,
woods by the Watuppa!
Ciao,
blankets and trees! A bed, a bed, a bed, a bed, a bed, a bed, a bed, a bed, a bed. A gust jolts them and the car swoons. Sarah opens her eyes and murmurs, “Stop kidnapping me, Walt. You have no right to kidnap.” He watches her pull her heels off and plop her feet, feet as big as his, on the dash. She yawns and droops her head again.

He thinks, The only bad thing about this is the secrecy. Of course he’d told Leon everything. In order to get the car and the days off from the store, he’d had to. This meant that Bets knew everything, too. But both Leon and Bets knew they weren’t to let anything out until Walt and Sarah got back from Rhode Island legitimate. Which meant the same thing in Massachusetts as it did in Rhode Island, because of the full faith and credit clause of the United States Constitution. Since he was going to have a wife instead of college, he was going to have to teach himself things. A marriage in Rhode Island’s a marriage in Massachusetts, and so on and so forth. But more important than the paper they’d bring home was getting the green light from Sarah to tell everybody. This was her show—she was the one with the mother. The Kaplans, upstarts, were supposed to feel lucky Sarah was allowing Walt into their fold, who cared how. Because Frieda Gottlieb, of course, was a different kettle of fish; her money was older. She had a lot less of it, but that didn’t matter. She might be locked away in that horrible green house in a neighborhood already gone to pot, but goddamnit it, her money was older, two generations older. The whole family, even the gang of pucker-faced cousins who talked like they were from England, make Walt squirm. And that Albert, always singing to himself, growing a full mustache at fifteen—even her little brother makes him nervous. The only one he likes is the dead father in the front hall picture, the one they all still talk to, good morning and good night, as if he’s still among the living. But that mother…a snake with hair and legs.

He dismisses them all from his mind and rubs the leather on the side of the door, whistles quietly. Nineteen years old and he doesn’t feel particularly old. But he doesn’t feel that young anymore either. It’s whole that he feels. More complete than yesterday. Yesterday, a day of trying on suits, shoes, ducking out of work early. Sarah’s hand rests on the seat near his knee and he reaches for her wrist but doesn’t touch it. Feet as big as his, but hands and wrists so small. Her wrists the daintiest thing about a girl not so dainty. He allows himself this moment where she can’t chastise him. “You aren’t marrying a ballerina,” she’d say if she noticed him admiring her wrists, which would mean more than the obvious. It would also mean he wasn’t marrying Bets, who used to dance ballet. Bets so light and tiny. Sometimes Leon carried her around on his palm like a waiter serving drinks. And yes, sometimes he does think about his sister-in-law’s legs, the way she leaps when she walks, the way she closes her knees together when she sits, splaying her little bird feet out, but that’s different, different.

Frieda Gottlieb tightens the shawl around her head by yanking on the ends. She stands in the front hall and looks at herself in the mirror and thinks of the ways Isadore went wrong with Sarah. The worst by far being that he took her to work with him. Let her play in the factory like a dirty-kneed Irish brat. Why did he raise her like she was a boy when he had a boy already? Grown man playing games with his daughter in a factory full of men and anybody has to ask where she went wrong? But wasn’t she a beautiful baby, all cheeks, big pouches drooping? Frieda examines her own face, not wrinkled so much as pressed in, as though her features are retreating into her head. The girl’s eighteen! Didn’t I love you, Poo? I didn’t play hide-and-seek with you and the grubby men who wanted to take you out in the field behind the factory and do unspeakables, but didn’t I love you? Frieda looks at herself, but she talks now to Isadore, whose picture, as always, lurks behind her, lording the front hall as he never did in life. Always more court jester than king, and maybe if he’d taken his own life more seriously for half a second,
she
wouldn’t be out there. Frieda listens to the slow creak of life as Albert begins his wake-up routine upstairs. Her late-sleeping son. So oblivious to anything that goes on in this house. Your sister’s run away for good today. Huh? What, Ma? Who’s runnin’ where? She listens to Albert in the bathroom, the pipes groaning and thwacking throughout the house, the plumbing another reminder of Isadore’s ineptitude. My daughter the slut with the little white suitcase her father gave her. Perhaps he knew how she was going to use it one day. Albert drops a glass on the bathroom floor. Yells, “Damnit! Ma!”

And she will not crawl back here no matter what monstrous else she’s carrying besides that suitcase.

Frieda looks at her face and touches her forehead as if to mark her own words. That’s what’s for certain. Banished. She can drown in her own stew out there, never here. Frieda goes to the kitchen for a broom and dustbin. Just before her face leaves the mirror, she sees those jowls, how they sagged off that beautiful child like popped balloons.

After he finds a space on Benefit Street behind the courthouse, Walt gently shakes her awake. Sarah opens her eyes slowly and realizes the car has stopped, that it’s happening. For the first time all day her eyes betray that she’s frightened. She has been since the moment she woke up and began furiously packing the suitcase, but she wasn’t foolish enough to let Walt know. She was well aware what impact her fear would have on his resolve. Walt so skittish. Puffs his chest like such a big man, but when it comes down to it, he’s scared of anything and everybody, especially her mother, who will twist her hands together for how long after this escape? Escape! As if this even resembled one. If what they were doing was escaping, they were like a couple of convicts breaking out and then stopping for coffee across the street from the prison. They weren’t forty miles from Fall River. After three nights in a hotel (of all of it, the news that they’d stayed in a hotel would torture her mother the most), they’d go home. To a little place he found on Weetamoe, the top half of a house that at least, thank God, wasn’t green. It was fading yellow, nearly white in the sun. Walt would take a risk only so far. But it made sense, didn’t it? His job. Our friends.
But couldn’t we have gone and done this out of New England?
So the fear in her eyes isn’t of her mother’s wrath, which can take a flying leap for all she cares. Let her yowl her head off. Let her rot in that house, with the neighbors hiding under their kitchen tables.

No, what Sarah’s afraid of is Monday afternoon, of being alone in that little furnished place on Weetamoe on Monday afternoon, of staring out the window at the corner. She sees herself watching some Italian kid jumping rope in the street. A little girl in a brown dress with big buttons that flops as she leaps. The girl, clean-faced but dirty all over, doesn’t see her, and wouldn’t think much if she had. Just another lady staring out the window like bored ladies do. But what choice do I have really? And aren’t I getting out of that house? Weetamoe’s only ten blocks up the hill from Robeson, but isn’t there a continent in those ten blocks? From her face, yes. Which is all that counts, though of course she also knows that a mother’s silent judgment reaches you wherever you are. That’d be true if she ran to Rio de Janeiro.

Walt doesn’t notice the glaze of fear in her eyes. He’s straightening his tie and tucking in his shirt as best he can while he’s still sitting in the driver’s seat.

“All right, banana,” he says. “Good sleep?”

She doesn’t say anything, just looks at him, curious at how someone can just plow along, unbogged. Not even fathoming what this is about, and it’s so obvious. Nostrils in a book his whole life, like her yeshiva-boy cousin Harry. Maybe reading shrinks Walt’s brain. She’s almost envious, and for a second she permits herself to be genuinely pleased. But she resists the urge to say something nice to him and slips on her shoes. She gets out of the car and takes in the huge red-brick courthouse, which according to Walt is famous in Providence because it dates back to the time of Roger Williams. Roger Williams, she thinks, another one who fled Massachusetts for postage-stamp Rhode Island. But at least
he
never got back in his canoe and went home to Monday morning. She stands on tiptoe and talks to Walt over the roof of the car.