Evergreen (15 page)

“I’ve heard everything.”

Not this. I can’t say it, no, I can’t. But I can’t keep it all alone inside, either. Not any longer.

“Has it to do with the child you’re expecting? Is that what you’re trying to say?”

She didn’t answer.

“It’s not his child? Is that it?”

“No,” she whispered. “Oh, my God, I would be better off dead!”

“That’s not for you to say. Only God knows whether you would be better off and He will decide, you may be sure.”

“But do I deserve to live?”

“Everything that lives deserves to live. And certainly this child deserves it.”

“I would feel better if I could pay, if I were punished.”

“And you think you won’t be? Every day of your life.”

The organ, which had stopped for a time, began again. The quiet music curled like smoke, like mist.

“I’ve looked for the courage to tell the truth to Joseph. I’ve prayed for the courage, but it doesn’t come.”

“Why must you tell him?”

“To be honest, to feel clean again.”

“At the price of his peace?”

“Do you think it would be?”

“You think about it for a minute.”

But no thoughts came, nothing coherent except the face of her little boy. He was sitting on the kitchen floor eating an apple.

“Is it, perhaps, that you love this other man?”

“No. No, it’s my husband I love.” An easy answer. True, and yet.… Peace and life and goodness; Maury, child of my heart; all these, weighed against that short exaltation, that rapture.

She cried out, “And so I have to go on like this!”

“If you were blind or crippled you would. People do.”
The priest sighed. “Human beings have so much courage, I marvel at how much.”

“I’ve used up all my courage.”

“You’ll find it again. And thank God for giving it back to you.” His voice was even, without reproach or sympathy.

“I hope so.”

“And after a while things will be easier for you.”

“I hope so.”

Perhaps he does know something. He hears and sees so many things. Surely this must have happened before to somebody else?

The priest stood up. “Do you feel any better?”

“A little,” she answered truthfully. Some of the weight had been relieved, as though she had taken it from herself and put it on him.

“Can you go home now?”

“I think I can. I’ll try. I want to thank you,” she whispered.

He raised his hand. His heavy skirt swept down the aisle.

The birth was hard. A neighbor took Maury and Ruth came to help.

“Odd that this baby took so long,” she said. “The second is always easier.”

Joseph studied the tiny girl in the bed with Anna. “Poor little thing! She looks worn out, too.”

Anna sat up in alarm. “Why, is there anything wrong with her?”

“No, no. Dr. Arndt said she’s perfect. I only meant, she’s thin and that makes her look frail.”

She was not pretty, the way Maury had been. She had sparse black hair and a monkey face. She looked anxious. But that was absurd.

“To think you two haven’t got a name ready for her!” Ruth said.

“I left it to Anna,” Joseph explained. “Maury was named after my father, so now it’s her turn.”

“My mother’s name was Ida,” Anna said.

“Something beginning with an ‘I,’ then,” Ruth mused. “You don’t want Ida, do you? It’s so old-fashioned.”

I’m so tired, Anna thought. What difference does a name make?

“Isabel,” Ruth suggested. “Or, I know, Iris! That’s a lovely name. There’s been a serial in the paper about an English countess, Lady Iris Ashburton.”

“Iris,” Anna said. “And now if you’ll put her in the basket, I think I could go to sleep.”

Shortly after the new year she wheeled the carriage homeward from the grocer’s. Maury trudged along holding her free hand. Halfway up the street a man in a priest’s dark suit came abreast of them and stopped.

“Boy or girl?” he asked.

Heat surged into Anna’s face. It had been dark in that place, but he remembered.

“A girl. Iris.”

“Well. God bless you, Iris,” he said, and walked on quickly.

God bless us all. The infant’s lips moved hungrily. “I want lunch,” Maury said.

“We’re almost home. I’ll feed you.”

And care for you both with all my strength. Where had it come from, this new strength? Like water in a river that had gone dry. Power flowed into her arms and legs, pushed her up the hill. I’m gritting my teeth; I must stop gritting my teeth. I am getting better, though. God bless us all.

The city stretched and spread. Its long legs touched the edges of Brooklyn and Queens, and leaped the bridges past the Bronx to the borders of Westchester. The city raised long arms into the sky. All along Fifth Avenue the wrecker’s ball, making way for new towers, crushed the Renaissance mansions of the millionaires. Those that were not crushed were turned into museums or offices for philanthropic agencies.

Hammers rang, steel on steel. Huge cranes, delicate as a dinosaur’s head, moved over the street. Ten thousand rivets were driven between morning and night, ten thousand steel woodpeckers in a steel forest. Laborers climbed the great skeletons, forty stories above the ground, sixty stories, eighty. Up and up. Everything was rising, the towers, the stock market and the fortunes of men.

These were the years of Harding and of “normalcy,” although they were not normal at all: such times had never been seen before and would not be seen again until after the next great war, a quarter of a century away.

Those who in 1918 had counted their assets in hundreds of dollars could in a few years’ time, if they were canny, hard working and lucky, count them in tens of thousands or more. The building business exploded like a rocket. Houses were sold before they were finished. Land values doubled and tripled and doubled again. If you were smart
enough to keep ahead of the forward movement you could turn a tract of empty acres on Long Island into a tidy community of two-family houses or six-story apartment buildings, into a lasting income or a splendid profit.

Not that it was easy. The telling is a great deal easier than the doing. Starting from nothing, one had to work eighteen hours a day to get a foothold. One had to keep on at eighteen hours a day if one were not to lose the foothold. Because, once it was lost, how would a man ever manage to get another?

A painter and a plumber began together with one small, heavily mortgaged apartment building on Washington Heights. They put themselves into it, all of themselves, their strength and every dollar beyond what they needed to buy the food on their families’ tables. They bought new stoves and bathroom fixtures. They scraped the floors; they repaired, they renewed from bottom to top. They painted every apartment and every hallway. They polished the brasswork and puttied the windows. They even bought two potted evergreens to stand beside the door.

There was no building on the block, or for many blocks, that looked like theirs when they were finished.

The tenants were astonished; it was years since the place had been so clean. A sign was put up outside:
No Vacancies
.

And then they raised the rents.

One morning a broker called. He had an investor, interested in well-kept, fully rented property needing no repairs. So they sold the house, having owned it not quite one year. Their profit was twenty percent.

They went to the bank that held their mortgage, to the real estate department. “See what we can do,” they said. “Now give us a mortgage on another building and well do the same.”

By the end of the year 1920 they owned two houses on Washington Heights. Neither of them had had a new pair of shoes or an evening out since they began. They were
plowing every penny back into property. They bought three vacant lots in Brooklyn. Then luck, pure luck, came into the picture, because the syndicate that owned the property adjoining needed their lots to put up a hotel. They named their price and the syndicate paid: it had no choice.

Now they met an electrical contractor and a firm of masons, father and sons: could they not pool their trades and do some building of their own? The mason knew a lawyer who had clients with cash to invest. They bought more lots and built a row of two-family houses: it is wise to start small. They had to rise at four in the morning to get to the job in Brooklyn on time.

The houses were sold before they were completed. A dentist down the block approached them with a proposition: would they be interested in a piece of Long Island land? He would like to go in with them. They could have the land for a song. Well, not quite a song exactly, but the price was right enough. More confident now, they built a whole tract of two-family houses, seventy-five houses and a row of stores.

Cautious, patient, tenacious plan and labor. Brick on brick, stone on stone. Buy, build, sell, hold, pyramid and grow. Very slowly, so very slowly at first. Then faster and bolder. A loft in the garment district. A garage on Second Avenue. Big syndicates, big mortgages. Growing profits and a growing reputation. That is how it was done.

And, of course, the times were right.

The times were right for lawyers or brokers, for textile merchants, manufacturing furriers or wholesale jewelers. Immigrants and the sons of immigrants moved northward from the tenements to the simple, respectable reaches of the Bronx and Washington Heights. Most never went any farther than simple respectability. Others, the more clever and the luckier, kept moving with improving fortunes. As the great fortress apartment houses rose along West End Avenue, with their elevators and doormen in uniform, these families came down from the Bronx and Washington Heights to fill them. They came with brand-new Oriental
rugs and silver, the acquisitions of an astounding, quick prosperity; brought, too, their vigor and a driving ambition.

The building on West End Avenue was sixteen stories tall, with two apartments to a floor. Joseph and Anna leased the one with the river view, nine spacious rooms and a large square entrance hall on the eleventh floor. Standing in the center of the hall one could look into the living room where the sky filled the tall windows, into the paneled library where Anna’s books in their boxes were still packed, into the splendid dining room with the long table, ten tapestried chairs and a Chinese screen concealing the door to the kitchen.

“Beautiful,” Ruth said admiringly. “And to think you put it all together so quickly! How did you do it?”

“I would have liked to take more time,” Anna said. “I’m not sure I like everything as much as I should. However, it’s done.”

“Not like everything! Anna, it’s gorgeous.”

“Joseph wanted it to be finished right away. You know how neat he is! He can’t stand living in a mess. He says he lived in one long enough! So he asked Mrs. Marks—that’s his lawyer’s wife—to show me where to shop, and here we are.”

“Well, it’s gorgeous,” Ruth repeated firmly. “Even a baby grand!”

“A surprise from Joseph.”

“Well, a home should have a piano, even if nobody plays. It looks so nice, don’t you think?”

“Iris will learn to play. Maury too, if he wants, but you know how Maury is. He won’t do anything unless he wants to. Iris will learn, if only to please her father.”

“Little old lady,” Ruth said. “Little four-year-old lady.”

“Let me show you her room.”

Iris’ room was pink and white and rose. There were shelves for her books, a little white bed with a canopy, a doll house on a table in one corner.

“Oh, the doll house!” Ruth cried.

“Yes, it was Joseph’s present for her birthday. She’s really too young for it, but he buys her everything he sees.”

“Men are always like that with their daughters. June is getting as fresh as her spoiled friends. I don’t allow her to get away with it but Solly can’t say no to anything.”

“And this is Maury’s room. I let him help me fix it up. He’s a big boy, after all, and so excited about moving here,” Anna said fondly, inspecting again the plaids, the trains spread on the floor, the banner on the wall between the windows:
For God, for Country and for Yale
.

“What’s that for?” Ruth asked.

“Oh, I thought it was nice. Besides, I would like him to go to Yale.”

“My sons are at N.Y.U. and we find it good enough.”

“Of course, of course,” Anna said quickly. “What’s the difference?” And wondering how to avoid the appearance of parading their success, she said timidly, “Joseph’s lawyer, Mr. Marks, suggested a good school for Maury. It’s where his own children go.”

“A private school?”

“Well, you know, I would never have thought of it, but Joseph meets these men, builders and architects, and he comes home with such ideas! … What can you do? It’s his money, after all, and he can spend it as he wants.”

“Private school,” Ruth repeated.

“Yes, and Iris will start kindergarten there in the fall. It’s more convenient to have them both at the same place, naturally.” Anna heard herself apologizing, and was annoyed with herself. What was there to apologize about? If Ruth was a little green-eyed, well, it was only natural.

“And you have a radio! We haven’t got one yet. What do you think of it?”