The Cosmopolitans
Authors: Sarah Schulman
Published in 2016 by the Feminist Press
at the City University of New York
The Graduate Center
365 Fifth Avenue, Suite 5406
New York, NY 10016
First Feminist Press edition 2016
Text copyright © 2016 by Sarah Schulman
All rights reserved.
This book is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.
This book was made possible thanks to a grant from New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.
No part of this book may be reproduced, used, or stored in any information retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior written permission from the Feminist Press at the City University of New York, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
First printing March 2016
Cover and text design by Drew Stevens
Cover and interior photos by Robert Otter © 2005 Ned Otter
The Feminist Press gratefully acknowledges Ned Otter for sharing his father's photography.
RobertOtter.com
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Schulman, Sarah, 1958â
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The cosmopolitans / by Sarah Schulman.
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pages ; cm
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ISBN 978-1-55861-905-0 (ebook)
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I. Title.
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PS3569.C5393C67 2016
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813'.54âdc23
2015017798
For Claudia Rankine
CONTENTS
“The past is never dead. It is not even past.”
âWILLIAM FAULKNER
B
ette's windows framed a movie of the world in lacerating color, solitary black and white. All was below, and yet knowable, from the second floor. Real theaters charged fifty cents for matinees and were easy to attend. But, sunken in the seats of Loews or the Eighth Street Cinema or the film house on Bleecker, looking up instead of down, she was diminished and felt controlled. Bette could never ignore the simple fact that what passed on the screen had already been seen by multitudes before her. Each time the projector clanged its reels, the characters reached an identical conclusion.
How can one story unfold the same way under so many different circumstances?
It could not. She didn't care for it.
She preferred the art cinema near Sixth Avenue, down the block from Nedick's hot dogs and orange drink. The films there were in French and Italian, with inadequate explanations in small print below the action or slapped across the actors' faces. It was more like
life, where she could come to her own understanding of events by assessing gesture, facial expression, and body language. Her apartment's windows offered this gift as well, but in panoramic variation so that the simultaneity of our lives became irrefutable. That we're all in this together. Musical, drama, romantic comedy, cartoon, suspense, cops and robbers, animal tale, even stag. Silent and talkie. Who needs Hollywood when there's Tenth Street? The show is always playing and it's always up for free.
As a girl in Ohio, it had to come from within. The dirt was so clean, it shouldn't be called dirt. It was empty, she could wash in it. No sign of man and his use of life. No passersby. There was a magic lantern show and then a nickelodeon. The newsreels rolled in with the war and she attended regularly, searching systematically for signs of her brother in France until he came home unscathed, with no stories, having only learned to smoke. The banality of it all turned her away from movies and made her a fan of the stage. Real life in real time, whether a carnival sideshow at the Ashtabula County Fair or Carousel on Broadway. Act One. Intermission. Act Two. Change is inevitable. What looks like nothing can become cataclysm. And then, of course, resolve. In Ohio, transformation was an elusive desire, but in the city, the theater of change constantly displayed itself before her. She'd have her coffee by that window, following the high jinks of those beloved weedy city trees, survivors who grow, sway, shade, bend, lose and build their leaves like matinee idols. The stars of the street were the streets. Surrounded by architectural forests. The trunks of
buildings turned dark with rain, burned dry, skidded with ice, and then preened in calm camaraderie. There were canyons for folks below who navigate natural ravines that float, freeze over, and sizzle the path to each person's dream. Set, costumes, soundtrack, and special effects all by chance. No dirt. It was all constructed with something in mind. An idea.
Almost time for the 6:00 p.m. show, so Bette sat up in her chair by the window. First on was Mrs. O'Reilly, sending seven-year-old Margaret to Joe's Fish Market across University Place. Bette saw Mrs. O'Reilly slap wet arms out on her windowsill, propelling her neck and then head, hovering over the street. Their building was a ship and Mrs. O'Reilly's profile their masthead, as the whole structure sailed forth behind her. Downstairs, on the corner, Margaret stood, pigtails tight, fist clenched around two dollars and a list of what to buy. Bette could see Joe through the plate glass windows of his shop, big belly, black mustache, thick glasses, shoveling fishy ice aside to haul up a slab of cod, expertly wrapping it in an old page of the Daily Sun. All the actors were in place, waiting for the streetlight to let them go.
And then it began. Mrs. O'Reilly seized the green moment, stretched even farther into the air over Romanoff's Pharmacy; the light flashed and she yelled out, “Cross!”
Margaret obeyed, knowing she was safe this way. Margaret liked to do as she was ordered and always would because she had her own concerns, and obeying made it easier to engage them secretly with passion. Outside responsibilities were assigned and
she followed, ever imagining that she'd be a nurse and someday ride a horse. That her father would come back to them and that school would magically and mercifully end. That her mother would get a radio and then a telephone, and that her green jumper would be miraculously clean by the next morning and more instructions would await on her breakfast plate. She did not understand the trance in which she lived as a warm hearth protecting her from her mother's sadness. But it was.
Joe saw her coming and waved up to Mrs. O'Reilly with his favorite hand signal, a-okay, as he opened the front door in welcome. A shopkeeper should treat his customers with love. They needed that and so did he. His son was in Korea, and Joe hoped someone was being kind to him. That's how it workedâ
I see you and then you see him
. Recognition, that's the key. Joe gave fishtails away to the poor and special ordered a whole striped bass when someone had a wedding or anniversary or graduated first in their class. When his son came home, his wife would make the boy a whitefish stew with peppers and onions and a baked potato with butter. Bluefish was the local crop, right off the coast of Long Island, as plentiful as stray cats. Thank God for Catholics, they have to have their fish. And the Jews chop theirs up once a year with some blistering horseradish.
Joe wasn't religious himself, but he knew that faith created order, and order was necessary to avoid the kinds of confusing wars that had sent his son away. He loved his Joe Jr. He didn't know how a person could live hating their own children, but there was plenty of evidence
of that everywhere he looked. He loved Margaret O'Reilly and he loved his fish. Margaret's mother had a hard time of it and had buckled down to her task. He wished she could show her child more love, less duty. Joe enjoyed it all, and he wanted Mrs. O'Reilly to feel the same way. He loved his apron and his cleavers and his old fedora and the keys that locked and unlocked the front door of his shop. This was the life.
Bette watched these relationships, filled with promise and threat. They all lived in front of each other, together. There was no pretending one was better than the other. Too late for that. “Everything has two faces,” Balzac wrote. “Even virtue.” That was one good thing about Ohio, it had made her a reader.
Wuthering Heights
and
Jane Eyre
and little David Copperfield all grown up. There would never be a paucity of good books. It was something always to look forward to. As dependable as the coming of evening's shadow.
Bette leaned a bit farther out the window to scan down the avenue, past Rubin's Deli, toward the singing, swinging, loafing branches of Washington Square Park. She checked to see if Earl had chosen that route home.
Rubin had lox for sale, bagels, bialys, pletzel. He had fresh wet farmer cheese in wax paper to cradle herring, smoked whitefish, smoked carp. Global purple onions exploded with demands next to the complimentary red tomatoes and hanging, greasy smoked kippers that the old men loved to eat. Next door to him sat the watchmaker, wild white hair, a single eyepiece, and devotion to minutiae. On the diagonal was Barney Josephson's new hamburger place, the Cookery. He
used to run Café Society and his wife Gloria worked for the poor Rosenbergs. Everyone in the neighborhood knew her, and everyone in the world knew them. Bette and Earl had discussed their fate, followed it closely in the newspapers. There was so much to understand. What is a spy? Can
any
person be one? Treachery is wrong, but which loyalty is more important, to the present or to the future? How could a secretary, like Ethel Rosenberg, outwit the United States? Bette was herself a secretary and it didn't seem possible. That's a small life. She knew it for a fact. If she wanted to betray her country, she wouldn't imagine where to begin. That's top information, not bottom.
Earl thought they were innocent, but Bette thought it was more complicated than that. They could have done “it” and still be innocent. She and Earl had listened to the radio together the night the Americans incinerated Hiroshima, and they both knew immediately that this was wrong. Now that the Soviet Union had the atom bomb,
we
Americans could never do that again.
We
could not take that much life at one time because then it would happen back to us. Tit for tat. It was a balance of power that keeps everyone civil. That's why Joe is nice to Margaret and Mrs. O'Reilly can buy on credit from time to time. Because we all have the ability to hurt each other equally, and as long as that's so, neighbors have incentives to stay on their best possible behavior. To be friends. Or at least friendly. At least to try. The Rosenbergs, dead for five years now, had been incinerated like Japan. But the Josephsons have a new baby boy, named Eddie. Life apparently goes on.
One of the most significantly positive occurrences in Bette's life was getting a corner apartment on the second floor. She could move to the bedroom and hear the children playing, the neighbors gossiping, and the birds hovering window height in the trees. The Italians liked to sit outside on folding chairs, even in the winter. They loved seeing who was coming home from work and hear everyone's grocery report. One boy, eight-year-old Salvatore, had a lemonade stand, two cents a glass. He also tried his hand at fortune telling, staring into an overturned cereal bowl, rubbing its contours. He had a future, this Salvatore, there were no limits to his entrepreneurial desires. Bette put down her penny, gave him a shot.
Sal furrowed and stretched in imitation of concentration. He caressed the bowl and closed his eyes. He took no chances, this Salvatore. Even he knew that Bette was a woman of a certain age, and so her life was in place and somewhat prescribed. Yet, there was still room for one last big adventure. One last enjoyable transformation before all the losing began. She wondered if this change would actually take place or just loom and then one day be surpassed.
“What do you see?” Bette asked the boy.
“I see . . . that you . . . will . . . go for a walk,” he said.