Up From Orchard Street (45 page)

The worst of it was that we had nothing to do, nothing to occupy the leaden waiting. There was no food to prepare, nothing bearable on the radio to divert us. For a while we sat quietly, immobile. We didn’t use the bathroom, or attempt to eat or drink.

At last Scott Wolfson came out of Willy’s room. “I have to drive home and sleep for a few hours,” he said, and like magic, we roused ourselves. Clayton, now aware that he was wearing my mother’s polka-dotted dress, said, “I’ll change my clothes.” Bubby commented, “Food in hospitals, you can’t eat it. Maybe I should cook something.”

Scott replied, “I’d like some more coffee with lots of cream and sugar. I need the energy.” He kissed Bubby good-bye and carried the coffee with him. I followed him into the elevator. He sipped his coffee in silence as we went down.

To my surprise I asked Scott, “What’s wrong with Willy?”

“Angst,” he answered. “You remember the day you were chased by those boys? That’s how Willy feels every minute of every day. Terrified, haunted, in flight from what he fears most.”

“What is he afraid of?”

“He listens to news of the war on his radio. But it’s more than that. He’s afraid of everything, everyone.”

“Not of Bubby.”

“No, not of Bubby.”

“Not of me.”

“Yes, of you.”

“Of
me
? How can that be? I take care of Willy. I always have.”

“He envies your boldness.”

“What does that mean?

“All the things you’ve done—that you do. Who you are. You walk in Little Italy and Chinatown by yourself. You take a shortcut home under the Third Avenue El. You’re not afraid of Harlem. Bubby told me that you stood in the street and didn’t show the slightest fear.”

“But I cried when the gang chased us. I fell down. My new muff fell in the slush. I pulled Willy all the way.”

“You pulled Willy. Think about that. I try my best for him. He’s my first psychiatric patient. But the damage, there’s layer upon layer of it.”

“Like Bubby’s strudel?”

“If only it were a strudel,” he said, and he handed me the glass. The front door closed behind him. Both of us avoided mentioning Lil.

Jack could not stop praising the wonders of Doctor’s Hospital. Lil was suffering from double pneumonia—both lungs were filled with fluid. He was permitted at her bedside in the ICU for half an hour and then told to stay away for three hours. During these periods various doctors came to examine her, specialists in pulmonary diseases. They didn’t speak to Jack. Dr. Frank and Dr. Koronovsky consulted with them about her vital signs, her blood tests, her temperature. Jack relinquished one of his visits to Uncle Goodman, who had come down from Yonkers, and he refrained from smoking on the pulmonary floor. Uncle Goodman kept repeating, “Jack, with everything you need luck. You found gold with these doctors. A movie star couldn’t have better. A queen. Ahf allah Yiddishe kinder such care.”

On Friday evening, Jack staggered home, watered himself in his beloved shower stall until his skin wrinkled, then dropped off to sleep in Bubby’s bed in the room she and I shared. He couldn’t bear to sleep in his own bed without his wife.

Two weeks later Uncle Goodman brought her home. The house was filled with baskets of fruit, boxes of candy, fresh flowers, plants. The get well cards couldn’t fit into our mailbox and Clayton waited for the mailman to slip the cards inside a fancy box that had come with a bed jacket “From the girls at Saks.”

“She looks sixteen,” Bubby repeated endlessly and indeed Lil did. Slim to begin with and having lost weight, her legs were as thin as a teenager’s, her hair hung straight to her shoulders, and like leaves in the fall it had turned reddish-brown. Pandy would have been pleased to color it but the doctors forbade it. “No dye, no makeup, no artificial products on her skin until she’s stronger.” This news created a stir, as if it were a medical instruction of the highest order.

“You heard about Lil Roth? Not a drop of lipstick on her lips. To bathe her, soap without perfume. No Chanel. Everything pure. She lost twenty, thirty pounds. A regular stick. Every day Clayton walks her up and down the foyer three times. That’s her exercise. It’s the latest. Did you ever? And the newspaper! Only the back where there’s entertainment and ads. Nothing from the front with bad news about war or love nests. From those she doesn’t need.”

Another ten days passed before Clayton led Lil into the street in a short stylish summer housecoat. He chose his black pants and white chef jacket for the occasion and he flashed a watch with a silver stretch band given to him by Lil’s doctors: Wolfson, Koronovsky, Frank. The inscription read “For service beyond the call of duty.” Holding Lil under the arm, he walked her exactly five minutes before he reversed and brought her inside. The onlookers applauded. The neighbors and passersby who had heard about her illness called out, “Keep up the good work.” I stayed across the street, nervous about her every movement, until she and Clayton returned inside. I praised every baby step of her progress. But my concern and anxiety for her rarely lifted. I had become as obsessed as Jack in devoting myself to her every movement.

Clayton, Bubby and I catered to her every whim. It gave me the greatest satisfaction to read to her from
The Great Gatsby
. Several times she dozed off while I read and I watched her sleep as if she were my child. Nights I’d strain to hear her, calling softly, “Mother, Mother.” I didn’t allow myself to fall into a deep sleep, yet I lacked the courage to confide my pain to Dr. Wolfson.

She cried at the ending of
Gatsby
. “Does such a love really exist?” she asked.

“Daddy loves you that much,” I replied.

A flash of guilt streaked across her eyes.

I rarely left her side. Bubby said, “When is a poor man happy? When he loses something and finds it again.” A found mother! Imagine that!

We agreed that she would be able to manage
Gone With the Wind
on her own, but we still discussed it chapter by chapter. It no longer bothered me that she was a slow reader. It increased our intimacy.

Beaming at her progress in walking, Jack reported a surprise for her. Pandy came to the house and applied a nonperoxide rinse to Lil’s hair before setting it, and brought over a hand-held dryer to prevent her from sitting around with damp hair. And a few hours later the true surprise burst through the door. Estelle Solomon.

Of course they both cried; of course they both laughed; they started sentences and broke off without finishing. To hide my own emotions I took the advice I gave Lil: deep breaths, letting them out slowly. I longed to kiss both of them at once. Estelle related most of the news while Lil and I listened raptly.

The Pankin boys, Gabe, and Estelle and her husband, Phil, were taking a trip together to California. Would Lil and her children like to come, too—first week of June, on the Twentieth Century Limited? Three days in Los Angeles. Three in San Francisco. For Maurey, it was a business trip. He was planning to leave Yale and enter UCLA Law School. He had decided to become a lawyer for movie stars—contracts, divorce, any problems with the law. He would be bigger than Greg Hauser. Smarter. Make more money.

“What about Linda?” I asked.

“Didn’t you read about it in the
Times
? She’s marrying a wealthy financial adviser. Did you think her family would seriously consider a Jewish boy whose father is a dirt farmer?”

Lil and I exchanged a swift, meaningful glance. For Linda, Maurey had been an afternoon quickie, to be discarded like a corn husk.

“And Sybil? Whatever happened to Sybil?”

“She’s with a Frenchman. They’re in the Resistance. No one knows where.” Estelle in her spring frock and straw hat encircled with multicolored silk flowers reached over to hug me. “Hal and Gabe are waiting for you to grow up. Didn’t you know that?” Lil smiled benignly, not really aware of the implications, but enthralled by our easy chatter.

Clayton brought the tea tray to the table—silver on loan from the Goodmans.

When Jack told Bubby and me that Estelle was coming to visit Lil, there had been some behind-the-scenes to-and-fro about what to serve her. Aunt Bertha had pressed hard for an English high tea with cucumber sandwiches, potted meat with crust served in clay tureens, petit fours. In the end Bubby decided on three styles of blintzes: cheese, fresh sautéed apples, and her own strawberry jam laced with lightly sweetened sour cream. Clayton’s table setting brought praise and so did his centerpiece of daisies. Estelle could not stop tsk-tsking about the tall windows, the floor-to-ceiling draperies, the eye-catching sofa. “No wonder you moved here from Yonkers! It’s an enchanting setting, so modern, so contemporary.”

She produced her present, a large square, heavily wrapped in brown paper. Clayton cut the intricately knotted cord.

“What is it? What is it?” Lil exclaimed.

“It’s a miniature Miró—the one lent to you by the art gallery when your apartment was photographed for the architectural magazine. Pete Peterson found it for me and had it framed.”

If the ride home in the subway after Maurey left us for his tryst with Linda altered my love for my mother in ways that defied mere logic, that gift of the Miró,
L’Arc de Terre,
with its abstract free forms in brilliant colors to signify the universe, sped my mother across a new threshold. I held back my tears as I watched her study the reproduction.

She held it out at arm’s length. She pressed it to her lips, to her chest. Once she had referred to the Koronovskys’ Fifth Avenue apartment as a library and barely noted his small but exquisite art collection. Now Estelle’s gift moved her as no other present.

“I love art,” she exclaimed. “I love it. I do.”

The throb in her voice was genuine; tears filled her lustrous green eyes.

“As soon as you’re completely well, we’ll try the Museum of Modern Art,” said Estelle. “Not as many steps as the Met and we’ll have lunch in the roof garden.”

Lil’s response was ardent. “I’d love that.”

Estelle burrowed into her spring straw purse. “And another thing.” She held up a newspaper clipping. “It’s from the business news. Didn’t you once work at Palace Fashions? The owner’s daughter, Rosalind, is opening a high-fashion boutique on Madison Avenue. Before the war she scooped up dozens of Parisian dresses and coats, handmade designer items, very chic, very expensive. The store is called Panache and it’s opening on Madison Avenue in September.”

“Rosalind is opening a high-fashion shop during the
war
?”

Clapping her hands with excitement, Estelle ventured the thought that Lil did not have the courage to express. “I’ll bet she’ll ask you to work for her because of your experience at Sak’s.”

“We grew up together. My daughter wore her daughter’s outgrown clothes. Why would she consider me?”

“Because you’re perfect for the job.”

“Yes, you are,” I echoed. “They would be lucky to have you.”

Gathering her things, which included a package of blintzes expertly wrapped by Clayton, Estelle kissed Lil. Bubby and I added our hugs to the departure.

“I’m sorry you’re not coming with us to California. Let’s make a date for Labor Day weekend in Connecticut. The boys were promised those three days.”

It was a perfect visit: the conversation, the food, the gift. It catapulted my mother from a long sorrowful sleep into a world filled with potential wonder. The promise of the museum visit and the opening of Panache by Mister L.’s daughter sped her recovery. “If only I could stand on my feet, if only I could walk!” Her laments made me realize how much I feared her return to work and how much she needed it.

“You will, you will,” Dr. Frank assured her. “But you must be patient. Relax. Allow your body to heal.”

“This whole long summer, what will I do with myself? What will the children do?”

For a week the entire family stayed in Yonkers. Like Bubby, Lil had never been as enamored of the old house as I was. She slept on the sun porch, took walks and grew lively only when the Goodmans went house-hunting. Now that their children were away at college, they longed for more modern quarters. We scoured the new houses in Westchester County; we drove to West End Avenue where Pete Peterson and Uncle Goodman were searching for buildings in foreclosure that they could renovate. I despaired at the prospect of losing the old Yonkers house.

“You don’t like progress,” Aunt Bertha told me.

“I don’t care for change.”

“Do you miss Orchard Street?”

“No, not that. Too much cold. Too much illness. But other things— the restaurant, the house full of people . . .” I broke off, fearful of hurting Bubby.

“You’ll love our new home. You’ll learn to love it.”

“The way Bubby loves Grand Street.”

Aunt Bertha pretended not to hear.

The days of summer stretched on, golden-hued but lifeless as a desert. Bubby, Lil and I walked to Orloff’s Garden Terrace building daily, marveled at its terraces, its vistas from the upper stories, and its kitchens with double ovens. We did not consider an apartment there.

One day Abe drove Bubby and me to Battery Park while Lil was taking her afternoon nap. I longed for the smell and sight of green grass, which the river did not satisfy. I spent long afternoons trying to amuse Lil and fill her vacant hours. I wept easily and every night I told Bubby that when I grew up I would leave New York forever.

“It was the same in Russia,” she admitted. “Some artists needed big cities, others hated it. Look at Levin in
War and Peace
. He would rather work with the peasants than live in Moscow.” Among her many endearing qualities was my grandmother’s ability to perceive characters from fiction with the familiarity she felt for people she knew.

I made my third visit to Connecticut by myself. Lil was too frail to travel and Willy didn’t want to go. He had agreed to visit the Simons, who planned to stay home in Brooklyn that year because Uncle Geoff was preoccupied with the start of a new business. I pestered my parents until they agreed to let me visit Pankin’s Farm alone. Scott Wolfson drove me to Grand Central Station, where a clerk from Phil Sullivan’s office met me and accompanied me to Colchester on the Labor Day Special. The only ones at the hotel were Gabe, the Pankin brothers, Estelle and Hank. All the guests had left the day before to make way for the carpenters hired to renovate the buildings.