Family Secrets (20 page)

From the start Lavinia never had a feeding problem. Melissa was astounded. Lavinia was unable to nurse (although she had planned to) because she was so thin and run down there was not enough milk, but Paris thrived on her bottle and was soon fat and rosy. She gobbled down her cod liver oil as if it were candy. Anything you gave her, she ate. She was born starved, and in a few months she was overweight.

Little skinny Everett, six and a half years old, had been waiting for this baby, who would be his cousin but really more his brother or sister. They could play together. Lavinia and Jonah were now living in an apartment only a block away from Melissa and Lazarus, and Everett was running in and out all the time. He was in first grade at public school, but he never brought little friends home to play after school or asked to be allowed to go to their homes to play with them. He seemed to think of Baby Paris as a kind of squeezable toy, one you could feed, make laugh, or pinch and make cry. He was very devoted.

Paris began to speak at seven months. Lavinia wrote down every word. She had a book called “Baby’s First Year,” and it contained a record of everything Paris said or did, her weight, her length, her first tooth. At the end of baby’s first year Paris said so many words that Lavinia could not record them all. The baby stood but couldn’t walk, but this was not unusual considering that she was obese.

At two, she not only walked but ran, singing out her favorite tongue twisters. Lavinia knew she had a very intelligent child. She was also beautiful, rosy cheeked, fat, with curly brown hair. People stopped Lavinia in the street to compliment her on the baby’s clothes. There were dozens of little dresses and bows Lavinia had made to go with each outfit, tied in the silky ringlets. Jonah said the baby looked exactly like him, but Lavinia knew she looked exactly like her only much prettier.

“Now a bite of lamb chop,” Lavinia said, feeding Paris. Down went the bite of lamb chop. “Now a bite of carrot. Oh, please, Mr. Carrot, the lamb chop is saying, come down here and join me!” Down went the spoonful of carrots.

Dessert was junket. Paris took one taste and threw the bowl of junket on the floor. “I don’t like junket.”

“Neither do I,” Lavinia said. She gave the baby a bowl of chocolate pudding. Paris gobbled it up.

“Gee, are you lucky,” Melissa said to Lavinia.

A fat baby was a healthy baby. Paris laughed and giggled all the time. At night she threw up. This was undoubtedly due to some allergy, just as Everett had had at her age, and eventually she would be sure to outgrow it. She threw up in cycles, every night for a few weeks, then not at all for a few weeks, then it started again. It was hard to tell what she was allergic to. But it didn’t matter, as long as she stayed fat and healthy. Lavinia didn’t mind having to change the sheets every night. She would do anything for that child, because that child was her.

TWENTY-FOUR

Climbing out of the Depression was more than a challenge to Adam, who liked challenges; it was a rebirth. He was like a phoenix climbing out of the ashes, and he reveled in it. Here he was, a man in his early fifties, and he remembered the young man he had been at the turn of the century, so ambitious, so hopeful, so careful and painstaking, and so lucky. He would be lucky again. This time there was no coffee house to linger in as an outsider, no stupid rich partner to help him because he had no means, no baby to feed. His children were all old enough to take care of themselves, and he was a famous man to whom the banks would give money, to whom the sellers and buyers paid attention. He would stay in real estate, but he would do exactly as he had done so long ago in Mudville. He would develop a joke and make it a miracle.

He looked around, and he had friends and information. He decided on the swamplands of Miami, near Miami Beach. Naturally, everyone told him he was crazy. He bought swamplands as he had bought the muddy land in Brooklyn, for a song, and he also bought land which was good but was so far away from the places which were developed and full of life that no one could conceive of them as a place where anyone would live or work. Swamplands could be filled in and reclaimed, and if a man built a community in the middle of nowhere other men would rush to fill in the empty spaces between.

He went back and forth by airplane even though everyone told him he was crazy to take such a dangerous, uncomfortable means of transportation when he could be having a pleasant trip on a nice, safe train. Adam did not have time for trains. He was a fatalist, and he felt it was not his time yet to die in a plane crash. In Miami he stayed in a Miami Beach hotel. He noticed that a good part of Miami Beach was restricted. The newspaper ads made this obvious: Restricted. Sometimes they were more tactful and said it was “near churches.” But what all this meant to Adam was that there was a need for a Jewish community, this time not for those poor immigrants whom he had housed so long ago in Mudville, but for their children who had made good, for their children to come on their honeymoons and for their vacations, to spend their new money, to bring their own small children on school holidays. And yes, it was also for some of those poor immigrants who had made good themselves, as he had, to spend their middle years and their retirement years, to enjoy warm weather all winter, to have sunny beaches to sit on and nice hotels to live in among their own kind, where they could dress up as they wished without being laughed at, festoon themselves in sequins and satins and garish colors, high heels on the sand, fur stoles in the eighty-degree heat, good jewelry with bathing suits, yes, anything they wanted, because they deserved it. These men had made good, and if their wives wanted to deck themselves out like freaks, and if it made the husbands happy to pay for it and see it as a measure of the goods they had been able to earn in this hard world, then what was the harm? For himself, he despised such rubbish. He liked simplicity and refinement. But if someone else wanted to be ridiculous, who was he to look down his nose? Let them dress as they wished and dance the ridiculous new dances with their fat wives shaking their big rear ends, let the old men make fools of themselves with their young chippies, let them all make merry, and he, Adam Saffron, would build them a pleasure palace.

He built his pleasure palace in the middle of nowhere, on the beach, and he also built an arcade of shops and restaurants, for he remembered that people never really change, and just as those immigrant families in Mudville so long ago needed food and clothes, so did his newly rich ex-immigrants need food and clothes, close to their dwelling places.

His pleasure palace was beautiful, with fountains and statues and mosaic tiles. The word went out, as he had planned it to: this kike builder is making a Jewish community. And so his people came to see it, to stay where they would be welcomed and made comfortable. The economy was turning around. Other builders, seeing what he had done, began to build. And so the two worlds, the Jew and the Gentile, began to move toward each other, each enlarging, slowly crawling together, each protecting its own, filling in the open beachfront with large hotels, covering the empty roads with streets and houses, and then Adam did what he liked to do best: he built an office building.

Business! Business brought people, business made them stay. An office building in the middle of nowhere was a joke, everyone said, but Adam knew the joke by heart. The office building would bring stores, the stores would bring customers and the transportation for them, and that would build another community. There would be a bank, and a movie theater. Another pleasure palace, with giant golden statues holding up the imitation sky studded with imitation stars. A building for men to work in, a bank to hold their money, stores to take their money, and the movie theater to bring them back at night to spend more.

Now men were calling him a genius instead of a crazy man. Adam was pleased but not surprised. They were unimaginative and they were afraid. He had thought of it, and now he accepted the praise with a modest nod and a little smile. He looked around meanwhile for a nice house to buy for himself and Lucy and the children. He could stay there during the cold winter months and manage his Southern properties, and then when the weather was clement he could take care of his business in New York. He had good men working for him, men he could trust. He had his two sons now, Andrew with a lovely young wife who had just become pregnant with their first child, and Basil the bachelor. Basil lived with Adam and Lucy, of course. And he had Lavinia and Jonah with their lively little daughter Paris (funny name, well, Lavinia was always independent) and Melissa and Lazarus with little Everett. They could visit on holidays. Rosemary and Hazel would of course live with him wherever he lived. He would need a big house.

The warm Florida climate would be good for Lucy’s lungs, or heart, or whatever it was. Just now, when things were going well again financially, she had taken a turn for the worse. Why couldn’t a man have some peace? Give, take away, give, take away. It made a human being nervous, made a man want to hold on to his family, to what he had, because it was all so fragile. Someday he would have his land in the country not far from New York City, and they would all live together. He wanted them close. They didn’t seem to understand how important it was, but they did what he told them, they respected his wishes. He liked that even now, given their own choices, they all chose to live close to each other, visiting each other. Why, Lavinia and Melissa visited his sister Becky more often than he did. In fact, the truth be told, he never had time to visit her up there in the Bronx, but she sometimes visited him, bringing her children, four of them now. Four children and four abortions. He knew because he had to pay for it all, the children she had and the ones she had agreed not to have. Why couldn’t she and Isman control themselves? The man could hardly make a decent living, but he certainly could produce children! Adam was not shocked by abortions. The midwife was clean. The practice, although it was not a happy event, was an old one, and he had always known about it. If you could not afford to have a child you had to get rid of it. But he also knew that it was not safe, it couldn’t be, to have so many abortions. One or two, yes, those things happened, but four was enough. Silly Becky would kill herself one day.

It was time for him to have a man-to-man talk with Isman, much as it repelled him to have to discuss such things. He invited Isman to meet him downtown for lunch.

Adam had not seen Isman for some time and he was surprised at how small and pale he looked. He still remembered the ruddy, eager young man who had come to marry Becky. But this man was almost servile, nervous but not in a charming way, in an almost doglike way, a frightened man, and he was no longer a boy. Ah, how dreams flew out the window. Isman seemed ill at ease to be here downtown in this fine restaurant with its wood-paneled walls, white tablecloths, and neat, silent waiters. Perhaps Adam should have taken him to a delicatessen, but he disliked delicatessens.

“A schnapps?” Adam asked kindly. He thought it might put Isman more at his ease.

“No thank you, Papa.”

“Since Prohibition was repealed nobody drinks any more,” Adam said.

Isman managed a weak smile.

Adam had a whiskey, downing it straight, the way he always had his schnapps. One, just one, and swallowed straight from a little glass. It was good for a man but did not blur the mind. Then he read the menu, although he knew it by heart, and ordered. He recommended to Isman what he thought the man might like, and Isman accepted his suggestions docilely. Adam thought with disgust that if he had suggested horse, Isman would have agreed.

“So how is Becky?”

“Fine, thank you, Papa.”

“Recovered?”

“Oh, yes.”

“And the children?”

“Fine, thank you, Papa.”

“And your job, it goes well?”

“Yes, thank you, Papa.”

“Managing inventory, it’s not boring for you?”

“Oh, no, not boring.”

“Good.”

Silence. The food came, and Adam ate quickly, silently, as was his custom, enjoying his lunch, paying it the respect it deserved. Isman ate in little nervous bites, also silent, but his silence was out of respect for Adam, not for the food. When Adam’s plate was clean he put his finger into his mouth and removed an offending morsel of meat that was trapped between two of his molars, and then he delicately wiped his lips and fingers with the thick, clean white linen napkin. The waiter removed the plates and brought coffee. Neither of them wanted dessert, or at least Adam didn’t and Isman said he didn’t. Adam wondered if Isman liked coffee. He supposed the man hated it, but was afraid to order tea. Well, too bad.

“You know, Isman,” Adam said, “When a man is an adult he is responsible for his own life and that of his wife and his children. He can’t be a child forever, depending on other people.”

Isman turned even paler.

“I’m sure,” Adam went on in front of this pale, perspiring man, “that you feel responsible for your family. It is you who has to feed them, to put a roof over their heads, to send your children to school so they can make something of themselves. You are the man of the house.”

“I’ll pay the loan,” Isman whispered. “I promise. Give me more time, just a little more time …”

“Sha! Forget the loan. The loan is a present.”

Isman seemed to come back to life, the color returned to his cheeks, he began to breathe normally again. “I thank you with all my heart,” he whispered. “Becky hasn’t been well …”

“I know. That’s what I want to talk to you about.”

“Florida …” Isman said. “It would be good for her in Florida. Maybe you could use me in one of your stores?”

“Why, you’re planning to lose your job?”

“Oh, no!” Isman paled again. “You didn’t hear anything?”

“What should I hear?”

“Nothing, Papa. I have the job, it’s secure.”

“Then why should I take you with me to Florida?”

“For Becky’s sake. No, no, I apologize. You’ve done enough for us already.”

“Becky wouldn’t like Florida,” Adam said. “She likes New York, she has her family and friends. I can’t use you in Florida. That isn’t what I wanted to talk to you about.”