Family Secrets (19 page)

“Don’t make him eat if he doesn’t want to, Toots,” he would say now, the good father liberating his son from the disciplinary mother. Good, the kid didn’t eat. More for him.

Papa sent a telegram to Basil telling him to come home. Basil said goodbye to his happy life and came home. When Lavinia and Rosemary met him at the ship Lavinia cried because she was glad to see him. Basil cried too, because he didn’t want to be there.

TWENTY-TWO

Andrew’s best friend at law school was named Ferdinand Bader, Jr. After the crash both Ferdinand and Andrew stayed on in law school, because both their fathers believed that no matter what the sacrifices, education came first for a boy. Ferdinand had found a part-time job, and Andrew was being subsidized by Adam, for even though times were hard a landlord could still collect some rent. There was no money to spend and no place to go, so whenever Ferdinand and Andrew had free time they spent it at the home of one or the other of them. It was at Ferdinand’s family’s apartment that Andrew met Cassandra, Ferdinand’s little sister.

When the crash came, Cassandra Bader was at finishing school in Switzerland. She was eighteen years old and had been there for two years, studying French, French literature, gourmet cooking, needlepoint, piano, riding, and skiing. She disliked all of them.

It was not so easy for a Jewish girl to get into a finishing school like the Lycée Capuchine. They would take a Loeb, a Lehman, a Straus, a Schwab. And of course, they would take a Bader. Ferdinand Bader, Sr., was a New York banker, of German extraction, with a little French thrown in. The little French had been thrown in by his mother, who had no French blood herself but had named him Ferdinand after her favorite uncle, Fredl. Cassandra Bader was an only daughter, a girl of exceptional delicate beauty. She was small and thin and chic. Her eyes were blue; her soft brown hair was so straight her barrettes slid right out of it. Her hands and feet were tiny. Her skin was white and poreless. Her posture was perfect. Cassie could get in anywhere.

Because she had always been an aristocrat of sorts, Cassie couldn’t care less. She liked pretty clothes, she liked to spend money and had no idea of the value of anything, but when her father lost his money overnight she took the shock with a shrug, came home, and went right to work in his office to replace the secretary he could no longer afford to pay. Being a secretary was much more interesting than doing needlepoint, and she immediately taught herself how to type. She didn’t miss her friends from the Lycée Capuchine, and she enjoyed seeing her older brother Ferdinand, who had been remote and uninterested in her when she had left home at sixteen, but who treated her almost like an equal now that she was eighteen and a working woman.

She also liked Ferdinand’s friend Andrew Saffron. Andrew was five years older than she was, and she was impressed by that, but more by his sweet gentleness. She loved his eyes. He treated her with amusement, because she was his best friend’s kid sister, and with respect because he saw her as a potential woman. The two young men let her tag along after them, and soon Andrew was spending all his free time with her, having told Ferdinand to find something else to do. Cassie was delighted when Andrew told her he was in love with her, and horrified when he proposed. She wouldn’t marry for years and years, at least until she was twenty-four. Marriage was forever. How could she live with one man forever, love anyone forever? But she was madly in love with Andrew.

When she had been going with Andrew for a year Cassie finally decided to brave marriage. On her wedding day, a simple ceremony in Adam Saffron’s house (because the apartment her parents had moved to after the crash was too small to invite all the relatives), Cassie looked at the rabbi, the assembled family, and her groom, and thought: “Well, if it doesn’t work I can always get divorced.” She figured it would last about a year, because she was so young and immature. A year was a very long time. She had been going with Andrew for a year and look at her now, a veil on her head, a bouquet in her hand, and in five minutes she would be a married woman. Good lord, the things that could happen in a year! Why, only a little over a year ago she’d been sitting in school in Switzerland, practicing her French conversation. Now she was stumbling over her Hebrew, and Andrew was putting the ring on her finger. Oh, well, if it didn’t work …

But how handsome he was! Cassie thought Andrew Saffron must be the handsomest, kindest, most intelligent, most interesting, sexiest man in the world.

After Andrew married Cassandra Bader, Adam inked in their names on his blueprint, on the house that was meant for the two boys and their wives and children to share.

Cassie and Andrew rented a small apartment in New York. Every day Rosemary got on the subway and went there to see Cassie. Her new sister-in-law had opened a new life for her. Rosemary was awed and worshipful as well as envious of this girl who came from another world and yet seemed to love her just as she was. There Cassie stood, ready to go out for a day of window shopping, slim and immaculate, a little hat pulled down over her neat, straight hair, a chic little suit with a real fur collar fitting perfectly on her flapper figure, a tiny golden Pekingese in her arms. The puppy was the final touch. Who else could get away with it?

And there was Rosemary, knowing everything about her clothes and hair was wrong and ready to die before she would ask for advice. She couldn’t copy Cassie. That kind of suit would never fit over her hips, the hat would make her big nose look worse, and with her luck if she carried a puppy it would shed. But Cassie was her dearest friend. Andrew was working all day in Papa’s office, and Cassie had quit her job to stay home and keep house. Who else but Cassie and Andrew would go to New York to live? And not even anywhere near Cassie’s parents either! They had gone to live in New York because New York was fun, it was alive, there were things to do there.

Of course there was no money, but two girls could walk for hours and gaze into the windows of the elegant New York stores, even go inside and touch things, pretend. Cassie looked as if she could afford to buy whatever she wanted, even though she and Andrew were as poor as Rosemary. Everything Andrew made went for rent and food. Cassie didn’t have new clothes, but her old clothes came from Paris, France, and everyone knew you kept those forever.

Sometimes Rosemary was afraid she was making a nuisance of herself, but Cassie insisted she come to visit, every single day, even when it rained. And then, most nights, Cassie would insist that Rosemary stay on and have dinner with her and Andrew. Sometimes she even invited a boy for her. But it never worked out. Rosemary couldn’t think of a thing to say, and she knew the boy was comparing her with Cassie, finding her lacking. She began to look at the boys she knew and to find them lacking. The ones at home in Brooklyn who asked her out all had something wrong with them. Why hadn’t she noticed it before? This one was boring, that one was funny-looking, one was too fat, one too skinny, that one too short, that one too tall, that one didn’t know anything about music, that one was stingy, that one was a showoff. What it all meant was that none of them, not one, was good enough to bring to New York to visit Cassie and introduce as her boyfriend.

It was all right to go to a concert or a movie with a boy as just friends, but Rosemary made it clear that she was not interested in anything more serious. The man she picked would represent her, just as Cassie represented Andrew, and he would have to make up for everything she lacked. She couldn’t imagine how she would find such a man, and if she did, why he would want her. She supposed she would end up an old maid, hanging around, everyone sorry for her and bored with her.

She met Earl Fischer at Cassie and Andrew’s apartment. They invited him to dinner for her as a blind date. He was the worst of all their offerings; Andrew was running out of old friends from law school and Cassie hadn’t known that many boys before she left home. But he was better than anything Rosemary had been able to dig up for herself. He was a lawyer, just starting out as a clerk in a law office. He still had pimples on his cheeks. He was rather cute otherwise, although Rosemary didn’t like them so thin, and she was not partial to blond men. He was a German Jew, his family had had money before the crash, and he was taller than she was. It was a start.

He liked movies and so did she. They went to movies twice a week, and had dinner at Cassie and Andrew’s twice a week, and after four months of this they became engaged.

Rosemary wasn’t sure what she had expected from being engaged, but it wasn’t this. She had thought she would have status, and indeed she did; people congratulated her, she brought Earl home to dinner with Mama and Papa and everybody was nice to him, she brought him to dinner at Lavinia and Jonah’s and they had a bottle of champagne they had managed to scrounge somewhere (bought it from Lazarus, it turned out later), and she brought him to dinner at Melissa and Lazarus’, where Lazarus said he seemed intelligent and Melissa asked her why he still had pimples. It was not at all as she had dreamed.

Rosemary had somehow imagined in a vague way that if she managed to hook one of Cassie’s offerings then it would automatically transform her into Cassie. But she was still Rosemary, and Earl Fischer instead of making her look better had started to look worse. She didn’t think she had ever loved him for a minute. She didn’t care whether he loved her or not. How dare he love her? How dare he try to make her a part of his life, and worse, enter hers?

She broke the engagement. Goodbye, Earl Fischer. Nobody seemed heartbroken. Melissa giggled and said that Rosemary and Basil were two of a kind, fickle heartbreakers. That was the biggest compliment Rosemary had gotten since her engagement. She realized then that breaking an engagement gave a girl a lot more status then entering one. Fickle heartbreakers! She looked around with new interest for new men to entice and ruin. Ah, how she would drag their hearts in the dust! But they couldn’t be too terrible, or else people would just think she was a fool. No more men with pimples. She would have to find a good one, and then say he wasn’t good enough for her. If she kept on doing that then people would have to believe her. They would think she had some mysterious power to fascinate men that wasn’t apparent to just anybody.

Of course, she had to find the good one first, and then he had to want her. It wasn’t as easy as she had hoped, but it gave her something to do. If she was going to be an old maid, at least she would go down fighting.

TWENTY-THREE

In 1931, the worst year of the Depression, Lavinia decided to have a baby. She and Jonah had been married for six years, they had some money saved, and she wanted to have her baby while she was still young. Always, from the start, it had been “her baby,” singular. It would be an only child, loved and petted and given everything she had lacked and wanted, and it would be a girl. She prayed night and day for a girl, and never even considered what she would do if it was anything else.

It was a difficult pregnancy. She had morning sickness for seven months, and threw up not only in the morning but after lunch and dinner as well. Her weight went down to ninety-seven pounds. Melissa said she looked like the toothpick had swallowed the olive.

She and Jonah were thinking of names. “I’d like to name it after my father,” he said, “if it’s a boy.” His father had died.

“It’s not going to be a boy,” Lavinia said.

“If it’s a girl, maybe we could name it after my mother,” he said. His mother had died a year after his father. People said it was from grief. When two people had lived together for so long …“You’re lucky both your parents are alive,” he said to Lavinia.

“Mmm.” Of course now she knew whom she must name her daughter after, and she could never tell anyone. She wouldn’t for the world hurt Mama, but the dead must be remembered. Mama would be the first one to agree. It had to be a P, for Polly, and there had to be a good reason, some logical reason that made everyone believe it.

Melissa gave her the reason. Silly, romantic Melissa, always dreaming of her Isadora Duncan. “A name I adore,” Melissa said one day, “is Paris. You remember Isadora’s lover, Paris Singer? The rich dashing one she refused to marry although she had his child? Isn’t Paris a lovely name? For a girl or a boy, either one.”

“Paris!” Jonah said, appalled.

“Why not?” Lavinia said. “Singer is a Jewish name.”

“Oh, Paris Singer wasn’t a Jewish Singer,” Melissa said.

“How do you know?”

“Paris is a place,” Jonah said.

“So what?” Lavinia said. “You’d rather name her Becky?”

“I didn’t say Becky. My mother’s name wasn’t Becky.”

But my mother’s name was Polly, Lavinia thought. For a moment she tried to remember the tall figure in the long purple cape, but the image eluded her. She could only remember being told about it. Her eyes filled with tears for the lonely little girl she had been, the sad, earnest little girl, the orphan. Her daughter Paris Mendes would have two loving parents.

“Don’t cry, Vinnie,” Jonah said quickly, putting his arm around her. “I didn’t mean to yell at you. If you like Paris for a name, then so do I.”

“I like it,” Melissa said. Since she had been married to Lazarus she no longer referred to things she liked as “terribly très chic.” She had become more subdued, and she never used words improperly.

“Don’t you think Paris Mendes is a lovely name, Jonah?” Lavinia said. “It sounds like somebody important. It goes together so well.”

“I hope he’s not a schoolteacher,” Jonah said. “They’d laugh at him.”

“She will never be a schoolteacher,” Lavinia said. “She’ll go into the arts. Our family is very talented in the arts.”

“What are you going to do if you have a boy, Lavinia?” Melissa asked. “Drown it?”

“Give it to you as a brother for Everett,” Lavinia snapped.

“Don’t snap at me. I was just teasing. When I was pregnant I was never grouchy like you are.”

“Well, everybody’s different.”

In the eighth month, just when she was enjoying her first month without morning sickness, Lavinia went into labor. Paris Mendes, female, was born a month prematurely, weighing three pounds, twelve ounces. She was a perfectly healthy baby, beautiful but scrawny, and she went into an isolette instead of an incubator.