Evergreen (8 page)

In the morning Mrs. Monaghan said, “Company tonight, you know. My niece Agnes will be coming to help. Just a family dinner, the madam says, but sounds fancy to me. Turtle soup, lobster mousse, lamb. She wants you to go up with her now to set the table.”

The dining room glittered with crystal, lace and silver. Silver platters and candelabra. Silver bowls for the chocolates and the roses.

“Some of these pieces are almost two hundred years old,” Mrs. Werner explained. “This coffeepot belonged to my great-great-grandmother Mendoza. See, here’s the M.”

“They brought all this from Europe?”

“No, this is American silver. My people came here from Portugal a hundred years before this was made.”

“So different from me,” Anna said.

“Not really, Anna. Just an accidental turn of history, that’s all. People are the same everywhere.” Mrs. Werner’s rare smile softened her cool face.

There’s something about her that’s like Mama, Anna thought. I never noticed it before. Something dependable and strong. I would like to put my arms around her. It would be good to have a mother again. I wonder whether she knows anything?

Mrs. Werner was handsome in dark red silk. She had wonderful white shoulders for an old woman, over forty.
The guests at the table looked like a family: parents, a grandmother and two sisters about Anna’s age. They had fair, freckled skin; their prominent, arched noses made their faces proud.

“I’d much rather go to Europe,” one of the sisters said. She wore blue lawn and her long pearl earrings moved like little tassels.

“Still, a month in the White Mountains is so lovely, don’t you think?” the grandmother remarked. “I always come back utterly exhausted from Europe.”

Anna moved around the table, passing and repassing the silver platters, pouring ice water out of the silver pitcher. Be careful not to spill. That’s Valenciennes lace on the grandmother’s collar. Mrs. Monaghan told me about Valenciennes. I’m glad he’s not looking at me. Shall I see him later?

Talk circled the table with Anna. Flashes of it sparked in her ears.

“The Kaiser is a madman, I don’t care what they say—”

“I hear they’ve sold their place in Rumson—”

“This outrageous income tax, Wilson’s a radical—”

“—bought the most magnificent brocade at Milgrim’s.”

“Ask Mrs. Monaghan and Agnes to come in, will you please, Anna?” Mr. Werner whispered.

She was not sure she had understood and he repeated it. “Then bring the champagne,” he added.

He poured three extra glasses and handed them to Agnes, Mrs. Monaghan and Anna. Then he raised his own glass, and everyone waited.

“I don’t know how to tell you how happy we are. So I’ll just ask everyone to drink to the joy of this wonderful day in all our lives. To the future of our son Paul and to Marian, who will soon be our daughter.”

The wine goblets touched, making chimes. Mr. Werner got up and kissed the cheeks of the girl in pale blue. The girl said something, very sweetly, very calmly, and made the others laugh. The laughter popped like champagne corks.

Mrs. Werner said, “Now I can confess that this is what we’ve been hoping for ever since you two were children.”

Someone else said, “What a wonderful thing for our two families!”

And Mrs. Monaghan said, “The saints bless us, another wedding in this house!”

Only
he
had said nothing. He must have said something, though, something she hadn’t heard. But it was all swimming, blurred and faint and far away—

Back in the pantry, Mrs. Monaghan whispered, “Anna! Go pass the cake for second helpings!”

Anna leaned against the cupboard. “The cake?”

“The walnut cake on the sideboard! What on earth is wrong with you?”

“I don’t know. I’m going to be sick.”

“Jesus, Mary and Joseph, but you do look green! Don’t upchuck in my kitchen! Agnes, here, take her apron and go back to the dining room. That’s the girl! And you, Anna, get upstairs, I’ll look to you later. What have you gone and done to yourself? Of all times!”

“You’re feeling better this morning, Anna?” Mrs. Werner was troubled. “Mrs. Monaghan told me you wanted to leave. I couldn’t believe it.”

Anna struggled up in bed. “I know it isn’t right to leave you so suddenly, but I don’t feel well.”

“You must let us call the doctor!”

“No, no, I can go to my cousin’s house downtown. They’ll get a doctor.”

Mrs. Werner coughed lightly. The cough meant:
This is nonsense because both of us know what’s the matter with you
. Or possibly it meant:
I can’t imagine what’s come over you but I am obligated to find out
.

“Is there anything you want to tell me, Anna?”

“Nothing. I’ll be all right. It’s nothing.” No tears. No tears.
He kissed my mouth. He told me I was beautiful. And so I am, much more than she
.

“Well, then, I don’t understand.” Mrs. Werner’s hands
clasped the bed rail. Her diamonds went
prink! twink!
“Won’t you talk to me, trust me? After all, I’m old enough to be your mother.”

“But you’re not my mother,” Anna said.
An accidental turn of history, was it? People are the same, are they?

“Well, I can’t stop you if you’ve made up your mind. So when you’re ready I’ll have Quinn take you in the car.” At the door Mrs. Werner paused. “If you ever want to come back, Anna, you’ll be welcome. Or if there’s anything we can do for you, call us, won’t you?”

“Thank you, Mrs. Werner. But I won’t come back.”

On a damp night a few weeks later Joseph and Anna sat on the front stoop talking. The sun was down. In the last light boys played a final game of stickball on the street. One by one their mothers called them in with long, shrill cries: Benn-ie, Loo-ey! Peddlers led their tired nags back to the stables on Delancey Street, the shaggy heads sunk, the shaggy hooves trudging. The life of the street ebbed away.

They talked about this and that, fell silent and talked again. After a while Joseph told Anna that he loved her. He asked her whether she would marry him. And she answered that she would.

He worshiped her. His eyes and his hands moved over her body and worshiped her. In the new brass double bed which he had bought he raised himself on his elbow and studied her.

“Pink and white,” he said. He twisted a length of her hair around his wrist, her slippery, living hair. He laughed and shook his head in wonder. “Perfect. Even your voice and the way you pronounce ‘th.’ Perfect.”

“I’ll never speak English without a foreign accent. A greenhorn, I am.”

“And you’ve read more, you’re more clever than anybody I know.”

“Just a greenhorn, Joseph,” she insisted.

“If you’d had a chance at an education, half a chance, you could have been something, a teacher, even a doctor or a lawyer. You could.”

Sighing, she stretched out her hand, the one with the wide gold band on which he had had engraved “J to A, May 16, 1913.”

“I’m a wife,” she said aloud.

“How do you feel about it?”

She did not answer at once. He followed her gaze through the door to the yellow-painted kitchen and the clean, new linoleum on the parlor floor. Everything was clean in the home he had prepared for her. Unfortunately, the rooms were level with the street so that the shades had to be drawn all day. When you raised the shades you could
see feet passing on the street, at eye level. You could crane out to see the Hudson and the Palisades, and feel the fresh river wind. At night the bedroom was a closed private world, the bed a ship on a dark quiet sea.

“How do you feel about it?” he repeated. This time she turned to him and laid her hands lightly over his. “I feel peaceful,” she said.

She stretched and yawned, covering her mouth. Ten chimes struck delicately from the clock on Joseph’s dresser.

“Pompous, silly thing,” Anna cried.

“What, the clock? I don’t know what you’ve got against that beautiful clock. You just don’t like the people who gave it to us.”

One day, a few months after their marriage, a delivery man had brought a package from Tiffany.

“He looked puzzled,” Anna said. “I don’t suppose he’s ever delivered in this neighborhood before.”

It was a gilded French mantel clock. Joseph had placed it carefully on the kitchen table and wound it. Through the glass sides they had watched its exquisite rotating gears and wheels.

“I knew the Werners were going to give us a present,” he had said. “I wasn’t to tell you, but they sent their chauffeur down to Ruth’s to ask about your health and she told him we were married. Aren’t you pleased? You don’t seem pleased.”

“I’m not,” she had answered.

“I can’t understand,” he remarked now, “why you resent those people so. It’s not like you, you’re always so kind.”

“I’m sorry. Yes, it was good of them to do. But it’s too rich for this house. We’ve no place to put it, even.”

“True. But well have a better place someday. Good enough for this and your silver candlesticks, too.”

“Joseph, don’t strain so much, don’t work so hard. I’m satisfied the way we are now.”

“Satisfied with a basement flat on Washington Heights?”

“It’s the best place I’ve ever lived in.”

“What about the Werner house?”

“I don’t really
live
there. It wasn’t mine.”

“Well, it ought to be. That’s the way I want you to live. You will live like that, too. You’ll see, Anna.”

“It’s after ten,” she chided him softly. “And you have to be up by five.”

Anna’s breathing whispered in the dark. She moved her legs and the sheet rustled. Footsteps hurried, clacking on the sidewalk only a few feet from his head. The little clock went
ting!
eleven times. There was no sleep in him, only a rush of thoughts, sharp and clear, one after the other, clear as etching on glass.

He worried. It seemed to him that as far back as he could recall he had always known worry. His parents worried. All the people in the houses on Ludlow Street, all the way over to the East River, worried. They worried about today and tomorrow. They even worried about yesterday. They were never able to let yesterday die.

Naturally, he had never seen the Old Country, yet he knew it well. It was a landscape of his life as surely as the street and the five-story tenements, the crowds and the pushcarts. He knew the Polish village, his grandfather’s horse, the frozen walls of snow, the sliding mud, the bathhouse, the cantor who came from Lublin for the holidays, the herring and potatoes on the table, his mother’s baby sister who died in childbirth, his grandmother’s cousin who went to Johannesburg and made a fortune in diamonds. He knew all these, as well as the terror of hooves on the road and the whistle of whips, the heavy breathing in the silence behind closed shutters, the rush of flames when a torch is put to a roof and the sigh of ashes settling in the morning breeze.

The burning of Uncle Simon’s house had been the act that decided his parents. They were a strange couple, still without children, so without reason for living, no? (What else is there to live for but to have children and push them up, healthy and learned, to a region higher than your own? That’s what it’s all about, isn’t it?) But they had none, and
his mother grew old before her time. Not fat and old from birthing and nurturing, but dry-old, pinched-old, empty-old. She had a stall in the market, and was known for her charity. His father was a tailor with round shoulders and red eyelids. He sighed as he worked, unaware that he was sighing. When he put his machine away he went to the synagogue. When he had said his prayers he went home. Tailor shop, synagogue and home, the triangle of his days. Why should such a pair brother to go to America? For what?

Then came the burning and something galvanized the husband.

“Your father came in,” his mother said. “The village was quiet. They had burned five houses, not ours, but it was an awful thing to see your neighbors, the women crying and the men just standing there, looking. So your father came in and he said, ‘We are going to America, Katie.’ Just like that he said it, and no more than that.”

“Did you want to come? Were you scared?” Joseph used to ask.

“It was all so fast, I didn’t have time to think. We got our tickets, I said good-by to my sisters, and we were at Castle Garden.”

“And then what happened, Ma?”

“What happened?” Her eyebrows went up, rising in a semicircle under her stiff and fading wig. “As you see, we opened a tailor shop. We ate, we lived. The only difference was that here everybody was all jumbled up, without grass, without trees.” For an instant there was slight regret in her voice. “Also no pogroms, no killing and burning.”

“And that was all?” Joseph used to press, waiting for the next part, the important part.

His mother played along. “Of course all! What else should there be?”

“I mean, nothing else happened to you after you came here?”

His mother would frown a moment, pretending to be puzzled. “Oh, yes, of course, one other thing! We were
here two years—a little more, actually—when you were born.”

Joseph would stifle a smile of pleasure. When he was very young, at seven or eight, he liked to hear this part. Later, whenever the subject of his birth arose, he would frown and wince inside, would change the subject or leave the room. There was something ridiculous in such old people having their first, totally unexpected child. He was the only one of his friends who had parents like his; more like grandparents, they seemed. The other boys had thin agile fathers and mothers, who moved about the streets quickly, yelling and running after their children.