Too Jewish (13 page)

"You."

"Does it look like war?"

I looked around. I'd read
Gone with the Wind,
which was my mental image of war. I shrugged. My mother waved her hand around the room. "Does this look like war?" I gave her the right answer. No.

"We've got a lot of shopping to do," she said. "You want that puppy, don't you?"

I knew what my puppy was going to look like. I managed to get through
Faust.
I could do a lot of daydreaming on that puppy.

* * *

Bernie would hate my using this word, but my mother jewed the woman down on the dog. She ruined the best part of the trip. I could tell the woman made a living breeding poodles. That's nothing to brag about. Except if you live in Paris, and it's the 1930s. She clearly needed every penny, well, every franc, though we were paying dollars. But my mother knew it. We left the hotel with Mama knowing the price: a hundred American dollars. We were leaving the next day, and she'd been spending like there was no tomorrow. Which for some people was sort of true, even if we were pretending it wasn't. But when we got to the apartment, she changed her mind. There was one puppy left, and I was crazy about that puppy. I wouldn't have a poodle now for anything, but a tiny white lamb was just right for a giggly girl. "It's the runt," my mother said. "I'll pay you fifty for it."

"No, Mama," I whispered.

My mother edged in front of me so I wouldn't be part of the negotiation. The woman used a slip of paper to write numbers. She started with 100. My mother countered with 50. The woman looked at the puppy as if she felt sorry for it. I did, too. My puppy was being insulted. I was going to have to protect it from my mother forever. Numbers are hard between languages. "But she is immunized," the woman said. "Fifty-five," my mother wrote. We paid sixty dollars for a priceless puppy. On the way out of the apartment, I hugged the woman. She wasn't in the mood for hugging, but it was the only way. I had the puppy in one hand, and I crooked my other arm around her neck. My mother couldn't hear me; not that she'd have understood. The woman had body odor, but her hair smelled of good sweet oils. "
Je suis desolee
," I whispered. That was one of the first things we'd learned in French. We were going to be polite world citizens. We would apologize. One day we would roll over French countryside.
Je suis desolee,
I'm so sorry.

The woman held me away from her and looked me in the eye. She could read my meaning. She kissed me on both cheeks, and in so doing she made it possible to love my puppy. "What the hell was that all about?" my mother said when we got into the hallway.

"You kind of ruined things," I said.

"No, Letty, as usual you ruined things. I don't know why you're always feeling sorry for pitiful people."

"She wasn't pitiful," I said. "She was just in a bad situation."

"I'll give you the money I saved," she said.

"Why don't you go back and give her the money?"

"People expect you to bargain."

I looked at Fifi. Of course she was Fifi. "Not over an actual life," I said.

* * *

I would like to be hypnotized some day. It would be amazing if I could see that day in slow motion, with perfect clarity.

We started getting ready in the dark because we had so much to do. Our suite at the Bristol was a mess: boxes and dresses were on every piece of furniture. Fifi was paper-trained, which I thought that was worth ten dollars alone, though the newspapers smelled bad. We didn't read the headlines; even in French they looked bad. Fifi peed on them, and I piled them on top on the bidet.

I packed my bag, as I'd been doing for three weeks. Everything had its place. I'd left home with just enough room for small souvenirs, which could go in the pouch where I was supposed to put my dirty panties. I didn't have dirty panties because I washed them out every night. Then I rolled them in towels to be sure they'd dry. In the south they didn't dry, so I put them on wet instead of packing them. I didn't have a lot of souvenirs, a charm for my friend Shirley's bracelet that took up no space, postcards from everywhere for me, zero room needed for them. I spent my own money on Daddy, a real bronze paperweight I got at the Rodin Museum. I could choose between the Thinker and the Kiss, so I picked the Thinker, even though everybody'd seen the Thinker. I couldn't give Daddy the Kiss, or the Gates of Hell, for that matter. Mama said it was stupid for me to bring him a present. I said I thought it meant something. "But it's his money," she said. "But it's my thought," I said. The paperweight took up very little space.

"You need to fit some of these clothes into your bag," my mother said about the dreaded dresses. I told her they'd be ruined, though I didn't care. They all were on hangers, and they needed separate hanging bags, which my mother had. "This is entirely too much work," she said.

She rang the desk. No one was working at five in the morning, except the kitchen staff. "Menial work is menial work," my mother said happily. A baffled, sleepy girl came up to the room ten minutes later. My mother didn't bark at her, but she also didn't notice the girl spoke no English. "All Letty's dresses go in hanging bags." The girl didn't move. "Oh, that's Letty." she said and pointed at me. The girl still didn't move. She looked around kind of wild-eyed. "
Mes robes
," I said and pointed at myself. The girl smiled. She was probably five years older than me, but I felt that as an American I would be worldlier. Even if a French girl had a job. I'd traveled, and I spoke two languages; at least I thought I did. I wound up doing an assembly line. Of two people, really. My mother gave up on doing any work herself because it wasn't easy, and she could tell. She sat and smoked a cigarette even though it wasn't light out yet. "
Pauvre gosse,"
the girl said when she left. She meant me. I'd ask my French teacher to translate though I could tell a little from her expression. She felt sorrier for me than for herself, and my mother had tipped her one lousy franc.

She didn't tip our driver to LeHavre fairly, either. She hailed a taxi in front of the hotel a little after seven. The driver expected a local fare: who goes far at that hour? Who goes far in a taxi at any hour? Then he saw our luggage. He hadn't heard us speak, so he probably expected a trip to the train station. Trains were still going places. We loaded up the cab, and my mother flounced in. "Luh hov-ruh," she said. I stood on the curb, expecting him to say no. "LeHavre?" he said. He didn't believe her. "Oui," my mother said. "Get in, Letty."

"Ah, les americaines," the driver said. He thought we were generous. Generous Americans would give a double tip, one for going out full, one for coming back empty. I saw what my mother gave him. "He has to go all the way back to Paris," I said at the dock.

"That's the way it is with cabbies," she said. "He'll get a fare going back. Stop worrying about people you're never even going to see again."

"I don't see any incoming ships," I said.

"You pay too much attention to your father," my mother said. She was beside herself. The dock was overrun with all sorts of lowlifes, and she was going to have a hard time finding someone to cart all her luggage. She began snapping her fingers in the air. "Boy, boy!" Then she remembered to be continental. "
Garcon, garcon
!"

Our garcon had a cart and a dark cap and jacket. And twenty years on my mother. He couldn't stand up straight, but he could try to maneuver. And that was hard in the crowd. These were the tired, huddled masses heading for the Statue of Liberty. Not too many of us first-class vacationers. My mother was beyond annoyed. "If I didn't know better," she said, "I'd think your father set this all up to prove me wrong." The garcon was pushing our luggage cart, and my mother thought that gave us right of way. "Coming through," she said. "Coming through."

There was one ship, probably the last ship leaving Europe, and there was no reason for English-speakers to be in the crowd. "Coming through, coming through." I heard German accents, French accents; all the accents sounded like one or the other. They could have been Dutch or Belgian. No English. My mother didn't care: she had a lot of luggage. Everyone else had a single bag, two if children were trailing behind. I saw too many children. These people were in my mother's way: she was sure she would miss the ship. Or lose her stateroom. "Now that I'm here, I might as well leave," she shouted to me. "What?" I said. She was making no sense. "No going back to Paris now," she said as loudly as possible. She was acting like she had an audience. The baggage cart bumped into a few people. The hanging bags shifted slightly, but nothing fell off.

And then it hit the young man, and everything cascaded to the ground. The young man turned around. I now know he was the man I would marry. I'm sure at the time I noticed what he looked like, but then I just felt sorry for him. He had one small valise. He looked annoyed, then sheepish. As if he'd done something wrong. "
Entschuldigen sie,
" he said. He was German, which made him riffraff to my mother. My mother stood and waited for him to start picking up her things. "
Excusez-moi?
" he said. His accent was perfect. That didn't jack him up much in my mother's estimation. She still waited. "Excuse me," he said. "Could you please pick up what you knocked down?" my mother said in her most polite, disgusted voice. That was more English than poor young Bernie had. Our garcon scurried to reload the cart. He explained it all in French. Bernie should have walked off, but he looked shocked by life. He stayed and helped.

It was an experience I remembered. And so did Bernie. Neither of us recalled the other by face, but it was a vivid moment. For me it was my mother's last unkindness on the continent of Europe. For Bernie, it was his first encounter with an ugly American. When we shared the stories, the overlay was perfect, of course. But when we told it to Darby, we told it much more romantically. "We just brushed past," we would say.

I have a feeling it wouldn't have made any difference if I told Bernie the truth about my parents. I mean told him the first time they saw one another as adults. He was too new in this country, definitely too new in New Orleans. I don't think he would have processed what I'd have said. That's strange, I know, given how the entire world had lied to him about goodness. He should have been cynical.

They saw him in temple on Yom Kippur. My parents were just like their friends, well, more like Daddy's business friends. They showed up so everyone would know it. Not that anybody was making a list. But after, outside, they could say, "Was the rabbi boring or what?" That's what passed for fellowship. Bernie was better material for gossip than the rabbi. "You see that Army kid with a yommickey?"
Yarmulke.
"Yeah, he was singing in Hebrew." "How'd you know it was Hebrew?" "It was the same as the rabbi." Laughter all around was a good start to the Jewish year. Which no one at Temple Sinai knew anything about, least of all me. I hadn't gone to Sunday school because ten o'clock had been too early on a weekend morning for my mother.

We went home and ate a ton of food. It was the middle of the afternoon. "Bernie said you break fast after dark," I said at the table.

My parents gave me the third degree. They were horrified: Bernie might as well have been a Negro. He was too Jewish. There was very little worse than being too Jewish; being a Negro was just about it. One time I had I thought about finding a colored boy to annoy them. But I genuinely liked Bernie. I was glad I'd given him my phone number in temple. I'd done it right in front of my parents, too.

Ted having introduced us didn't help. Ted lived four houses down, and Ted went to Newman School with me. Now Ted was in the Army. Everyone was in the Army, but my mother still thought it was
déclassé.
She thought a deferment was more proper. Maybe Ted could have hurt himself playing tennis. Boys who were in medical school had enlisted, boys in law school had enlisted, but my mother thought the military was dangerous. A good boy could get hurt. Not that Ted was a good boy, but he came from a good family. At least a family that lived on Versailles Boulevard. Versailles Boulevard didn't have front windows for mothers to put lights in. Those were for row houses in Brooklyn or Philadelphia. My mother had strange ideas; we were at war, but it wasn't her war.

Bernie brought my mother a gift the first night we went out. I thought that was classy. Very European. Better than any boy I'd ever known. The gift also was spectacular, worth far too much, if he'd had to pay for it. It was one of the items he was trying to sell. He really was in business, he really had something going, back in New York. His friend Axel was making great strides while he was in the Army, and anyone other than Bernie would have impressed the hell out of my mother, I just know it. A mink-covered matchbox; that was elegant. First she stuffed it into her pocket, unopened. Bernie had wrapped it in white paper, with a fine gold ribbon, and it was the wrapping that made me sad, her rejecting the wrapping. What he never knew was what went on after he was gone. She opened it like she was emptying a mouse trap. That's an exact comparison. Like it was a dead mouse, fur and all: she lifted it with two fingers. I saw her face. I'd have thought it smelled terrible. "Can you believe it?" she said. "They all turn into New York Jews. He comes here and tries to pretend he's giving me a gift, but all he wants to do is get me to help him promote his little business. Letty, this guy is so beneath your station. Do you understand?"

No," I said.

"Don't talk back to your mother," my father said.

"I just said I don't understand."

I looked at the gold ribbon, and it made me sorry. All rumpled and thrown to the side. I knew he didn't have money for ribbons. "He doesn't have money for ribbons," was all I could think to say.

"As usual, I have no idea what you're talking about," my mother said.

"Bernie's not trying to be in business," I said. "He was trying to take me out on a date."

"You're too sheltered," my father said. "You don't know when someone is using you to get to me."