Evergreen (11 page)

“I don’t mind that store. What else would I do with my time?”

“You don’t mind my going, then?”

“No, no, go and be well. Only one thing … Joseph?”

“Yes, Ma?”

“You won’t lose your faith, going uptown? Living up there mostly with Gentiles, I suppose?”

“There are plenty of Jews, too, and I’d rent a room with a Jewish family, of course. But a man’s faith is inside him, he takes it wherever he goes. You needn’t worry about that.”

She took his free hand between hers. “No. I know I don’t have to worry about that.”

She was still in the store. He sent her money every week, brought more whenever he came to see her, but he saw no signs that she used any of it. She wore the cheap cotton dresses sold from the pushcarts and to the synagogue she wore the same black dress she had worn when he was a small boy. He suspected that she saved everything he gave her and would someday, at her death, return it all to him.
A vast lonely sadness filled him when he thought about her. She was sixty-three and looked much older. More than once he had urged her to sell the store and move uptown to the Heights. But she would not. She had made one great move in her lifetime, across the ocean, had put down a few tentative roots on Ludlow Street and that was enough.

The only thing she seemed to want was for him to be married. One day a year or so after he had moved uptown he had come back to see her and found a visitor sitting at the table in the kitchen, a bearded middle-aged man in a creased black suit. A briefcase lay on the table.

“My son Joseph,” his mother said. “Reb Jeselson.”

A matchmaker. A flash of anger went through Joseph. He stood rigidly, without acknowledgment.

“Your mother tells me you want to get married.”

“I do?”

“Reb Jeselson came by, we happened to meet and we got talking,” his mother interposed. There was alarm in her eyes. “And I happened to mention that I had a son, it just came about quite accidentally and he asked, Well, does he know any nice girls, would he like to meet any? And I said, I suppose he knows some girls, of course he must, but I suppose he might want to meet some more, so if you happen to know any nice girls.… After all, a man can never know too many!” she said with gaiety, as if they were joking at a party.

Reb Jeselson removed a folder from the briefcase, spreading half a dozen photos on the table.

“Of course we shall have to talk, you and I. You’ll tell me what you have in mind. For instance, do you want an American-born girl or one from the Old Country? I’m sure you want a religious girl, I know something about your background,” he murmured. “No, not that one, she’s a very fine young woman,” removing one of the photographs, “only the problem is she’s so tall, taller than most young men. You wouldn’t want to look up to a wife, now, would you? Let me see, now here’s a girl from a wonderful family—”

“I’m really not interested,” Joseph said firmly. And, softening at his mother’s look of dismay, “Some other time. I didn’t expect you today. I wasn’t prepared—”

Reb Jeselson waved him aside. “No obligation. None at all. I only want an idea of what’s on your mind. Then well make another appointment at your convenience, no hurry—”

“But you see,” Joseph said desperately, “you see, I already have a girl. So I’m really not interested at all, thanks just the same.”

Reb Jeselson turned reproachfully to Joseph’s mother. “You didn’t tell me! And I went to all this trouble!”

“I didn’t know!” she cried. “Joseph, you didn’t tell me. Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I didn’t know until just now myself,” he said.

They both stared at him as though he had gone crazy, as though he were an idiot or a fool.

Anna. Anna, white-and-pink. A flower on a tall stem in a garden. He had never seen a real garden, yet in some way he knew what it would be like. Fragrant and cool and moist. He hadn’t thought he was ready to be married yet; actually he had planned to wait until he was older, thirty perhaps, and well on his way before he encumbered himself. But now it seemed that he was ready, after all. Almost from the first time he had seen her sitting on the steps, reading some learned book in English, and she not a year off the boat!

Her voice, her little feet in kid boots, her sweet-smelling hair, her pretty laugh. The funny, serious way she talked about things. A girl from a village in Poland, and she knew about painters in Paris and writers in England and musicians in Germany! How did she keep it all in that proud, bright head! Oh, Pa would have been pleased with her! He smiled. Pa wouldn’t have had the faintest idea what she was talking about, he would have known less than I, and that’s little enough. But he would have known quality when he saw it.

Again she stirred in the bed beside him and murmured something in her sleep. He wondered what she might be dreaming, and hoped it was no pain or sorrow. He knew so little about her. Lying there in the dark, he thought how separate they were after all: is it always so? Oh, surely not! Surely if she needed him as he did her they would come together.… He knew that her need, her love, were not like his. But they had been married so short a time, only a few months. He could be patient. They would have a child and that itself would draw them nearer. Yes, they would have a child: perhaps one was already on the way? In the powerful surge and release when they came together surely there was the creation of a child? Such feelings must result in something; wasn’t that what life was all about?

His body began to grow light under the covers. His mind began to blur. He thought: now, now I’m falling asleep. Keen thought lost its edge; his mind began to float in a lustrous mist, a wash of shifting shapes and color, red ovoids, lavender spirals, columns of cream and silver rising like smoke. Then a curtain fell, dark foliage of dreams, and through the dusky green a spray of gilded dots, confetti dots. No, coins they were, golden coins, and when he reached out his hand they fell through his fingers and into his palm: not hard, not metal at all, but soft like rain, a soft, protecting rain to wash over Anna and his mother and his father. No, no, he thought, it is too late for my father and soon will be too late for my mother. But for Anna, over Anna, the warm and lovely golden rain must fall.

By midnight he was asleep.

They stood modestly back to back in the women’s bathhouse until their bathing suits were on, black taffeta skirts, black stockings, slippers and straw bonnet tied under the chin so the breeze couldn’t blow it away. Anna had never worn a bathing suit before; her legs, except for the stockings, were uncovered to the knees and she felt ashamed to go out in public like that. But she would not have admitted it to Ruth, who had been often at the beach and was very sure of herself.

“See, I told you the suit would look fine!” Ruth said. “You don’t show at all, and the baby due so soon! As for me, I always look like an elephant when I’m expecting. Come, well find a good spot before the crowds arrive, that’s the best thing about getting here early,” she went on, as they lifted their feet through the heavy sand.

Solly and Joseph had already spread the blankets. Harry and Irving, big boys of nine and ten, knobby like their father in maroon striped suits, were already in the water. The little girls had shovels and pails.

“Ah, there you are!” Joseph cried. His expression, that no one else would have noticed, told Anna that she looked very fine. In these few months they had already got a kind of secret “married” language; she had thought it would take longer for a man and woman to do that.

“Now I can really see the ocean!” she said. “It was different
when we crossed over, so dark and angry, it seemed.”

Here the sea was mild and lovely, the surf breaking in rows of ruffled white and sighing softly out again.

“We’ll be going in for a while,” Solly announced.

“Let me go too!” Anna cried.

Joseph frowned. “No, no. God forbid that you should fall! Next year I’ll bring you, I promise I will.”

The blankets had been spread next to a breakwater. Ruth propped herself against a rock and put the lunch basket in its shade. “Wait till you see the fireworks tonight. It’s a pity there aren’t more holidays! Decoration Day we come but it’s usually too cold to go in the water then. Look at those boys of mine, look at them splashing! They’ll get water in their ears! Maybe I’ll just duck in, too, for a minute.”

Anna lay back. The baby moved in her, thumping weakly against her spread palms. Her body was languid from its warm burden and the warm sun. What would he be like, this child? She was so impatient to see his face. What would he be
like?
Would he live with them happily, would he love them? Sometimes, no matter what you did for them, children did not love their parents. Would he be like anyone they had known, or perhaps like someone long dead whose name they had never even heard?

Oh, but this was a wanted baby, as much by the father as the mother! Joseph took such pride in her swelling body, the skin stretched tightly, blue-white as milk. He worried and fretted. “You don’t have to be cleaning and cooking all day. A couple of eggs for supper will be enough for me. You don’t get enough rest, you’re always running and doing something.” Then, a moment later, he would admonish, “Be sure to get out and take a long walk tomorrow, it’s very important to have exercise. That way you’ll have an easier time, Dr. Arndt says.” She had been astonished. “You spoke to the doctor?”

“Well, I wanted to hear for myself that you were all right, so I stopped in.”

Yes, Joseph would always take care of things. She thought of him as a builder and planner, moderate and
careful; he had come to their marriage with confidence; he would build it carefully, stone on stone, to rise and last. In him there was no betrayal. He meant what he said and he said what he meant. In him there was only trust. Lying beside him at night, she felt his sturdiness, the safety of sleeping there, the tenderness.

And tenderness was all she wanted. The other, the force that drove him as though he would plunge in and become part of her, she did not need. She knew that he was feeling something very powerful, but she felt nothing of it herself. It was only the loving warmth that mattered. She supposed, anyway, that women never really liked anything more than that; the rest was only to satisfy a husband and to have children. Not, of course, that she had ever discussed the subject with anyone. Perhaps, if she had had a sister? But then the sister wouldn’t have known any more about it than she did.

Once, when she had been stitching trousers at Ruth’s, Anna had overheard two of the women whispering something about being so tired at night, and how no matter how hard they worked men were never too tired. Still, it was good to know that your husband wanted you. The things he whispered at night—it was embarrassing to remember them. But men were made that way, so it must be a good thing, it must be right.

“You look like your mother, Anna,” Ruth said. Anna opened her eyes. Ruth was standing over her, drying herself with a towel.

“Do I?”

“I never saw her very often, but certain things about her come to my mind. She was different from other people.”

“How different?”

“She didn’t talk about the things women in the villages talked about. I always thought she ought to have lived in Warsaw or maybe Vilna, where the schools are. She would have fitted there. Although she never complained, not that I remember, anyway.”

“You don’t remember anything more?”

“No, I was only a child myself, after all, when I left home.”

And I remember standing in the windy burial ground thinking that I must try to hold on to their faces and voices before they should slip away. And now they have really slipped away. And there isn’t a human being on this side of the ocean who knows anything about my life up to four years ago. It is a severance, the major part of my life cut off, except in the privacy of my own mind.

“It’s too bad when a family is split like that. You’ve no one close here for your children to know, except for Joseph’s mother, of course.”

“She’s sixty-four,” Anna said.

“Is she? I would have thought even more, she seems so old,” Ruth remarked.

“She’s had a hard life. We wanted to bring her today, she’s never been at the beach. In all these years, imagine! But she wouldn’t come.”

“What will you do when she gets too old or sick to keep the store?” Ruth was curious. “Do you suppose Joseph will want her to live with you?”

“I don’t know. We’ve never talked about it,” Anna said, suddenly troubled. That gloomy, sour-smelling old woman in the house! Then came a wave of shame and pity. Poor thing, poor thing! To be old in another woman’s house, a strange young woman who didn’t want you!

“If that ever happens and Joseph wants her, why, well have to do it, that’s all,” she said quietly.

“You’re a kind girl, Anna. I’m glad for both your sakes that I sent Joseph down to talk to you that day.”

“I’ve never thanked you,” Anna said, with embarrassment.

“Pshaw! I wasn’t looking for thanks! But
he
thanked me, he was quite mad about you from the very first time. He thought you didn’t like him, that’s why he was afraid for so long to talk about marriage. You know,” she explained, “he thought you were in love with somebody else, but I told him you weren’t. If it had been anyone but Joseph I
would have let him go on thinking so, because generally it’s a good idea to keep men guessing. But Joseph is different, he’s so—” Ruth sought the word—“honest. Yes, that’s it, he’s so honest.”