Esther Stories

At Horseneck Beach

SHE’S WEARING a daisy-patterned yellow one-piece and an enormous blue hat and she’s rubbing sunscreen on her husband’s flubby back. He’s got a cigarette drooping out of the side of his mouth, and he’s so pale he looks like he spent the last thirty years in a basement. She slides her fingers under his waistband. He leaps and yelps, For crying out loud, woman, on the beach in front of all these people? She hands him the bottle. Now do me. He takes the bottle and squeezes a burble of lotion into his palm. Then he breaks an egg on her head, one hand cracks his lotioned fist, and he slithers both hands past her ears. She does not scream, just says quietly, I’ll kill you you fat bastard. He shakes the remaining contents of the bottle on his own head and musses his hair. Now both have shampoo-lather heads. She takes his hand and says, I should have married Bea Halprin’s brother, Aubrey, the dead one. Let’s swim, he says. He’d have croaked by now and I’d be living on State Farm. I said let’s swim, he says. They walk to the edge of the water and linger there. That wasn’t funny about poor Aubrey, he murmurs, as his wife, who is Sarah, dives and shrieks into the cold June Atlantic blue.

Sarah

THE THRILL of murdering her mother’s plants. It comes back to her while pushing her baby daughter’s wicker carriage down Everett Street. Something about the wind and the shadows of the trees and the frightening radio reports makes her think of her father’s doom. She was twelve, and her father was smothered under piles of blankets on his deathbed, except that he wouldn’t die. And nothing could convince her that her mother hadn’t put him there. So she’d stomped across the house and yanked up all the plants by their roots, and run outside, tearing at her own hair as if it too were a plant. Her mother wondered to the doctor, who was in the house attending her father, if her daughter wasn’t possessed by something. “She’s always been an hysterical girl. It’s been known to happen in this town, you know.” And the doctor sipped his tea and laughed, but held off saying anything out loud about Lizzie Borden in a house so full of death already. Instead, he said, “The girl’s grieving, Frieda. Let her be.” But the idea made Sarah smile, too, standing in the long brown grass beneath the open kitchen window, listening. The idea of wielding that famous ax was not all that unappealing. Hadn’t Uncle Solly told her that when he was a boy he delivered newspapers to Lizzie herself’s door at Maplecroft, and that she always gave him dimes and pats on the head, even if she did do it? And everybody knows she did it, Uncle Solly said. So you could still be good after doing something like that. If she did it, she promised herself, she’d spare her baby brother.

“He isn’t dead yet, Azariah,” her mother answered the doctor.

And she remembers not hearing what the doctor said back, because she was already running, running down the cobbled streets, barefoot, stubbing her toes, hating her mother, and at the same time knowing how right she was — that no, he wasn’t dead yet, that he was going to linger in that bed with that goat, the maid, Lillian, sponging his head forever, and she’d never be free to blame her finally and absolutely for doing it to him, for all those years of haranguing that drove him upstairs to bed for good. Her father retreated, skulked away from living; he didn’t flee.

Now she looks at her own daughter, her Rhoda, bonneted, curled up, huddled in blankets, one foot sticking out over the edge of the carriage. One little leather shoe. Walt made such a game about shining her shoes with spit and polish. A daughter of mine’s gotta look her best gorgeous!

Again she sees herself sprinting across these bleak streets, into and out of muddy puddles. Her bleeding feet numb. There was a war on, just as there’s one brewing now, and she remembers thinking then she’d just as soon all the soldiers die, if her father had to die. Because, though she knew nothing of what men do after they fight wars, she could see them coming home already, alive, those marching men she had watched from atop her father’s shoulders, to flowers and songs. She could hear her mother praise them. And her father will still be upstairs, not dead but dead, and she’ll still be a girl who’s lost everything.

She remembers running and being happy she killed those plants and sorry the doctor didn’t agree with her mother, sorry he didn’t say, Yes, Frieda, maybe this girl is possessed by demons. Because she wanted Dr. Buffington to examine her the way he did her father. Wanted him to poke her and look under her eyelids. She wanted to be the one, not her father, to rub her sores and rub her sores and rub her sores. It should be her in that bed wrangling, kicking off the covers (he was always either too hot or too cold), wheezing like an exhausted horse, rubbing. The one with Lupuserythematosus. A word she practiced saying, over and over. Such a huge and ugly word for a laughing, big-eared man. She wanted to be the one upstairs in the bed while her mother, in the kitchen, moans that the noise is killing her: My husband dying of a woman’s disease.

Sarah wanted to be the one that stupid Lillian sponged and cooed.

A mother now, a wife now, but the streets will always be the same. Farragut. Gardner’s Neck. Weetamoe. Massasoit. Wampanoag. Running, toes bleeding. She could never get far enough away. The baby shakes the bonnet off in her sleep. Her father died. The soldiers came home. Her mother still won’t look at her baby.

Walt Kaplan Reads Hiroshima, March 1947

HE SITS in a creased maroon leather recliner with his feet flat on the rug. The book is slender, nearly weightless in his hands. The door of his tiny study is closed. He reads by the light of a lamp that sits on a dark oak desk, now cluttered with a few opened books, face down. Otherwise the desk is tidy, with a lone paperweight in the shape of a terrier (the same one he once tried to glue to the hood of his Ford in a dig at Cy Friedman and his Cadillac DeVille), a heavy-duty stapler, a leather-bordered blotter, and a small framed photograph of his daughter as a baby. His wife, Sarah, gabs in the back yard with Erma Friedman — he can see them from the room’s single window — the ladies stand, wavy dresses in the gust, by the huge boulder that looms oddly between the two houses. It is late afternoon, Saturday. He reads. By page 13 the flat nonchalant terrorless prose begins its scream. Everything flashed whiter than any white. He reads.

No one could say that Walt’s not a patriot. In the war he was 4-F. Wife and daughter plus extreme asthma. So he joined the Civil Defense. His job was to make sure people retreated to their houses, to their basements, when the air-raid sirens shrilled. Walt Kaplan, rooted in the middle of Weetamoe Street with his steel helmet loose on his head, ordering and pointing. A starter’s gun loaded with blanks jammed into the waistband of his pants, the idea being that if people didn’t move fast enough he could fire into the air. Once he’d threatened to do it when that loony Roland Shutan refused to stop mowing his lawn. Walt had raised the little gun above his head but hadn’t fired, and though the gun made him almost a soldier, he never liked the weight of it in his palm.

And though the 4-F made him a coward and he despised it with every ounce of his soul, he couldn’t picture himself firing on anybody, even Rollie Shutan, even with a gun that shot only blanks. A man with a wife and daughter killing anybody. But didn’t Melvin Zais have a wife and son, and didn’t he die in Italy, a married hero with a son to worship his photograph? Didn’t scrawny Mel Zais die with a gun in his hands? Mel Zais, who worked alongside him at J. J. Newbury’s and later at his father’s store, who lived at 618½ Tuttle Avenue his whole life, even after he married Irene and they had Toby, dying at Anzio with a gun in his hands, sweet Italian soil in his mouth and a single Fascist bullet in his temple. Now, in this thickened quiet of 1947, when he no longer is called to the street (he keeps the little gun in his drawer), he reads of Truman’s bomb, more than twenty thousand tons of TNT, atomic, and Father Wilhelm Kleinsorge in his underwear. He reaches the bottom of page 48.

To Father Kleinsorge, an Occidental, the silence in the grove by the river, where hundreds of gruesomely wounded suffered together, was one of the most dreadful and awesome phenomena of his whole experience. The hurt ones were quiet; no one wept, much less screamed in pain. No one complained; none of the many who died did so noisily; not even the children cried; very few people even

Walt stops near the top of 49, remembering the number, not folding in an ear. He balances the little book on the arm of his chair. Father Kleinsorge, no hero, a German Jesuit priest in Japan, a thin, lethargic, bent-over cornstalk of a man. The man was sickly even before what Hersey calls the noiseless flash. Walt leans his head back over the top of the chair and stares at the ceiling and knows it’s lunacy, probably worse, sacrilege, an insult to the suffered, but he envies Father Kleinsorge. Envies him in his underwear in a country not his own amid the mute death, bodies under every bridge, on the banks of all seven rivers of Hiroshima. Frighteningly silent children coughing and dying in the smoke of Asanto Park. Sarah would say, Walter B. Kaplan, time to get your overheated noggin examined by Dr. Gittleman, some parts are grinding down already. And Father Kleinsorge clawing through the splintered wood of a ruined house for a voice faintly calling, and Walt Kaplan in the middle of Weetamoe Street with a whistle and a pretend gun. A child’s toy. A track-meet popper.

He stands and walks the tiny room, pausing at the Kaplan Brothers’ Furniture Store calendar that hangs on a thin nail by the window. His father, Max, and his two uncles, Irv and Yap, in fancied-up oval pictures, his father frowning, his little uncles grinning: Have we got a deal on a sofa and loveseat combination for you, Mr. and Mrs. Oblinski, yes, we do…A two-year-old calendar, still on February 1945.

Walt Kaplan, thirty-one years old and already his back hurts, his hair barely clings; he feels as if he’s peeking through a crack in the door on fifty. A soft-spoken man who after a couple of drinks will laugh and tell Old Fall River Line stories for as long as his friends and brothers-in-law will listen. Built a bar down in his own basement for that very reason. So he’d never have to worry about the bar closing on a story. New England to New York on the Old Fall River Line. That, and with a bar in his own basement, Sarah gets to keep one ear on him, and so long as he can drink a little and mostly talk, he doesn’t care that he never gets to go to Orley’s. Walty K.’s Home Front, Alf and his brother Leon still call it down there. Three chrome stools with red vinyl coverings. Heavily varnished bar top and Walt’s famous mermaid swizzle sticks hidden in a coffee can behind the old cash register. A big man, roly-poly since he was a kid. For the most part he carries it well — though stairs have always been a huffer and he fights to keep his shirt stayed tucked. Loves and fears his wife, adores his daughter to death.

He doesn’t ache for the bravery. The reaching into flames, so unfathomable — seared flesh sliding off grabbed hands and Father Kleinsorge, not repulsed, holding on to what was left and pulling. No, something far more simple. Walt’s astonishment that Father Kleinsorge had vigor left to save. That his energy even half-matched his instincts. Walt stares at the calendar, at his dead father’s now berating eyes. Then at his father’s crumpled-faced brothers, the little bachelors who worked like dogs to please Max, who haunt the store even now, bitty wizened ghosts hovering among the lamps in the storeroom.

He thinks, I would have collapsed in a fat heap had they beat us to it and dropped it on Fall River. The Japs or the Germans.

The Civil Defense patrol captain for Ward 9 (Weetamoe Street to the 300th block of Robeson), me with my 4-F and cursed asthma and my Sarah and my Rhoda, and I would have wheezed and gasped. Would not have run from the chasing fire with babies in my arms. I am six years younger than Father Kleinsorge. I would not have saved my wife and daughter and the Minows, and the Friedmans, the Ranletts, the Bickles, the Pfotenhauers, the Eisensteins, the Corkys, and goddamn Rollie Shutans. A hundred thousand people writhing and shrieking, dying American style, the two onion domes of St. Anne’s exploding, both the Quechechan and the Taunton blazing, and I would have been under the Ford, whistle in my mouth, gun in my useless hand—

Sarah knocks gently on the door. But as is her way — to remind him that her deference to his private study only goes so far — she says loudly, accusing, “What are you doing?”

“Reading, Sarah.”

“Reading Sarah? What’d I write?”

He laughs. “Don’t come in here.”

“We’re meeting the Gerards at the Red Coach at 7:30.”

“The place that’s shaped like a caboose?”

“Seven-thirty.”

“Rhoda?”

“She’s going to stay at Ida’s. Gabby’s over there. We’ll swing by on our way home.”

“Fine.”

Sarah stays at the door for a couple of moments, stoops, and looks at him through the keyhole. His back is to the door, but he knows what she’s doing because he heard her knees snap and her breathing sound closer. One time he taped over the hole with black masking tape, but she poked through it with a pencil.

“I said it’s all fine, Sarah.”

Her feet clump heavily down the stairs — his wife is no breezy chicken feather either. Without looking back at the little book, Walt opens his closet. He keeps his shoes and suits in his study. He picks up a shoe, takes it out of its felt sleeve, and inhales a big whiff of the polish. No smell like it in the world. All his shoes smell this good. Like taffy apples soaked in dye.

Sarah tromps back up the stairs. She didn’t like something in his voice. As though their conversation through the door never ended, she says, “What are you reading?”

“Nothing, Sarah.”

“Walt.”

“About Hiroshima. The Hersey book.”

“The one where we’re supposed to feel sorry for the Japanese?”

He opens the door. “Sarah, you don’t know.”

His wife is crimson and anxious, standing in the narrow hall. She is thirty and raised a child during war (she used to send Walt out to trade vegetables for extra candy rations), got news of her sailor brother Albert’s death at New Guinea in a letter from the War Department, her being his older sister, his closest living relative. Not to mention Pearl Harbor. Not to mention what the Nazis did to Jews. Who needs more sorry? We’ve got enough sorry as it is. This man. So swayed by newspapers and books as if they were God and everything those men wrote in them was always true. As if what they said were more true than her framed letter from the War Department: With love of country and utmost valor. Has to crack him on the head sometimes to pull him out from under that reading. And she used to watch him from behind the blackened curtains of the kitchen window, standing bowlegged in the middle of the street with that whistle and helmet playing General George Patton, warning neighbors in a tone of voice they never heard from Walt Kaplan before: Citizens, if this was a genuine air raid, you’d have approximately six minutes and forty-five seconds. Those days, when the papers shouted U-boat in the Cape Cod Canal and scared all the old fishermen out of their bananas. Everybody watching out for periscopes in their toilets.

Walt looks at Sarah, his face drained of color, bleached, like a drowned child. Rhodas. How many thousand daughters reaching and that priest wasn’t even in the Civil Defense.

Sarah watches his stricken face, so close to hers, so familiar, so changing, withdrawing. His shoulders tremble. He’s holding a shoe. Afraid of what, Walt? What? You beautiful cowering man, already old in the eyes. You’ll die before I do and leave me in this house and the silence from the basement will kill me. Shhhhhhhhhhhhhhh! You drunken whozits are waking the baby!

“Walt,” she says. “Hold still. Hunk of sleep in your eyes the size of China. Telling me I don’t know. Hold still.” Sarah fingers the yellow schmutz out of the edge of his eye with a nail. Then she pulls her finger down his cheek and lets go.

Melba Kuperschmid Returns

MELBA KUPERSCHMID was a beautiful one, and everybody knows what happens to the beautiful ones. Scooped up and gone before she turned twenty. He was a traveler; nobody even knew his name or what he did for a living, only that he had daring and never lived in one place for very long. But her old friend Sarah Kaplan used to get postcards from places that didn’t seem very romantic from the photographs. Windsor, Canada, for one. Hamilton, Ohio, for another. Then, twenty-three years after she left, as everybody claimed they knew in their heart of hearts would happen sooner or later, Melba Kuperschmid came home. Discarded like the beautiful ones always are, one way or another. But when she came back to Fall River, she wasn’t fat like everybody expected. She was still gorgeous. Still had all that hair and those enormous black eyes men fell into, flailing. Still Melba, not destroyed, even a little giggly, like she always was. Not lamenting being deserted, not even discussing it.

For a few months she went to cocktail parties and talked (politely) to the husbands, letting everybody know from the way she refused to laugh at the men’s bad jokes that she wanted no part of them. This of course made the wives suspicious. What else could a returned (spurned, vanquished) divorcee possibly want if not their potbellied husbands? The other curious thing was that not long after she came home (she had no family left, and she’d had no children) Melba — now in her mid-forties — opened a seamstress shop on Corky Row, apparently with her alimony money. She’d always been good at sewing, a lot of the girls remembered that. But Melba Kuperschmid? A dressmaker?

Sarah had always loved her. As girls they often left school in late morning and spent afternoons trudging the mud along Watuppa Pond. Slogging and cackling about people. They used to talk about what they’d do when they got to Paris. Twirl in the streets, first of all. Then search for dark, Mediterranean men with unpronounceable names and wispy, tuggable mustaches. For Sarah, Melba’s return was a strange jolt. She’d been marching forward. She’d raised Rhoda into a girl people talked about (Rhoda had been elected “most garrulous” and “best dancer” by her class at Durfee). Sarah had served as volunteer chair of the hospital charity luncheon eleven years in a row, and was a respected member (and past treasurer) of the Hebrew Ladies Helping Hand Society. The new house on Delcar wasn’t so new anymore, but the mortgage was far from dead and buried. There was Walt and his cars. He talked about his old junked cars as if they were children who’d grown up and gone away. Now he was in love with Volvos, which made him, according to him, avant-garde. Rhoda already in her fifth term at Smith the year Melba came home, 1961.

Was it really possible that Melba wanted nothing more than to open a shop and live quietly, modestly, in a rented apartment mid-hill? Sarah tried to distance herself from the gossip of the girls. There were all kinds of explanations. Dotty Packer said that some cousin of Leddy Levine (of the Harry Levines) told her that Melba’s ex-husband was a gambler who fled because he was wanted by J. Edgar Hoover and the Sugar House Gang for extortion and unpaid debts. Somebody else — Ruth Gerard — said Melba’s husband was a kind of junior-issue sheik who got summoned back to Arabia to marry a sultan’s first-born daughter. That was a good one. Ruth Gerard always came up with good ones, and Sarah chose not to add that she had in her possession an old photograph (Melba had sent it from the Midwest somewhere) of the man she married and he was white as white could be, bare-chested, leaning against a tree, wearing a bowler and a crimped smile that made him look like he was being pinched, but oh, was he handsome, very. The only thing Sarah would offer the gossip eaters was a lie she claimed she’d heard from Tenelle Donnatello (who was considered close to the new Melba because it was from her husband, Felix, that Melba rented shop space) that Melba had left him, not the other way around. This of course prompted Bea Halprin to huff, “Well, in that case, where’s her other man? And why come back here if life was so wonderful she could ditch him in the first place?”

The fact was that nobody knew because nobody asked. Even the most fearless nosey parker, Ellie Dondis, didn’t have the courage to broach the subject directly. Because there still floated about Melba a halo of untouchableness, an aura that went beyond her physical beauty into realms no one could describe in conversation. She’d had it since she was a child, and everybody recognized that it still shrouded her with as much force as ever. (For example, they all started wearing hats indoors again.) Yet since Melba was something of a shopkeeper now, it became a question of class. This didn’t bother Sarah, of all people, but it did, after a while, make it more awkward to invite her to cocktail parties, and eventually the girls stopped asking her to most gatherings, except the occasional low-profile non-charity luncheon. And when this didn’t appear to ruffle Melba’s feathers, some of the girls started saying, Maybe there’s something wrong upstairs. Didn’t something like this happen to Sylvia Zagwill’s brother Jerome, that one morning he just refused to get out of bed ever again? There was a lot of dispute on this point, because even those girls who stopped sending over invitations still took their dresses down to Melba to be fitted or let out. First, out of pity, they took things they no longer wore. Later they relied on her because she was so good they couldn’t live without her. Finally the consensus was that anybody that excellent with the needle (particularly after all these years) couldn’t possibly be crazy. But that didn’t make the socializing problem any easier for anybody.

About eight months into Melba’s return, Sarah parked the big Lincoln Town Car on the street in front of the house on Delcar. (Walt always insisted she drive his past loves; this elephant was so huge it didn’t fit in the garage.) But she didn’t get out of the car. Instead, she paused and reflected that she’d just spent a good chunk of her time at the market worrying over the mystery of Melba Kuperschmid: her lack of bitterness, her lack of interest in reclaiming any former glory. They had all been so jealous — she was the envy of a thousand girls — it must have been real. Now her coming home and not caring a lick threw everything into question. The way she used to walk the halls, as if stepping on puddles of air nobody else could see, the boys quivering and gnawing their collars. Sarah left the groceries in the car and went in the house to look for something that needed mending. Not finding anything, she went into Walt’s closet forest of white shirts and ripped the sleeve of one. Got back in the car, melting strawberry ice cream and all (this was in August), and headed down the hill to Corky Row. She found Melba behind the counter, alone, her back to the door, working the Singer, the clicking monotonous, feverish, loud enough for her not to hear Sarah open the chimeless door.

And Sarah stands mesmerized by the back of Melba’s head. Her hair is pulled back tight in a plait; its end rests on her shoulder. Sarah looks at the exquisite column that forms that familiar neck. If she could freeze a moment in time, she’d freeze this one, the one before Melba turns around and sees her, because it isn’t the new Melba she wants, it’s the old one, the one who left here looking for something better. To ask what it’s like to be so loved that rolling your tongue around your teeth’s enough to make men swoon and need cold water. And that still not enough for you. Melba, with your simple black hair and big eyes, still no breasts to boast to the Queen of Sheba about, and yet you’re Melba, aren’t you? Aren’t you? You were two years ahead of me. And you used to whisper that you stole a pack of Mr. Jalbert’s cigarettes. Come on, Sare. We’re as good as gone! And that was all it ever took.

In the shop, pressing her handbag and the shirt to her chest, listening to the manic click of the machine, watching Melba’s head. Maybe Sarah will tell her again (she wrote her about it after, in a flurry, and sent the letter to one of the many addresses she had for Melba then) about her own escape from Fall River. She’s sure Melba’s forgotten, if the letter even made it to her. And of course it was only for a weekend, but there was Sarah Gottlieb’s famous eloping to Rhode Island. People still talk about how Rhoda was born big and healthy barely seven scandalous months later, and how her mother’s rage lasted till the day she died. Didn’t Sarah take her risk, too? She never thought it would matter again (she was just like so many other people now), but now her once running means more.

She clears her throat. “Melba dear, I thought I’d drop by and bring you—”

Melba swivels her stool. Slivery wrinkles below her eyes like veins in a leaf the only change. It could be 1936. They could be on the shore of Watuppa talking about Howie or Hughie, the one from Boston who chased Melba for months, one of the many she didn’t choose, the one who kept circling her block in his convertible, hundreds of times a day. They called them Howie’s laps, and they became as much a part of the neighborhood as Mrs. Gilda Rubover’s garden of rabbit skeletons.

Yes, the same as ever, but tired now, too. Maybe it’s the sallow light of the store, but there’s exhaustion in that still-beautiful face. Melba’s eyes linger before she welcomes Sarah with her old closed-mouthed smirk. It’s in the way the sweat’s pooled in the notch of her upper lip, a glimpse of what’s disappeared in that trickle of moment before Melba calls, sprightly, over the noise of the machine, “Ah, Sarah.”

And Sarah looks at her and thinks, We’re becoming older women, on the verge of turning into those fat-ankled waddlers at the club, the ones that Walt says keep disappearing into their shoes. Even you.

Melba waves her closer. “Sit! Sit!” The shop is cluttered and stuffy. Fabric is stacked in piles on the floor. Skirts clipped on hangers are draped over ironing boards. Measuring tape’s in a heap. There are books on a shelf alongside a pile of sewing magazines. There’s a bowl of chocolate and a ripped calendar. A cat. Even you, Melba. You can’t hide behind not caring.

Melba tosses a pincushion away, wipes off a wooden school chair with a rag. “Sit! Sit! For God’s sake, sit down, Sarah.” She sighs. “So good to see you. Too too long. I haven’t laid eyes on you in weeks, ages, honey.”

Sarah sits on the edge of the chair to make clear she can’t stay long, that she’s only pausing for a quick chat. She tells about the shirt, what a klutz Walt is, how he insists on wearing his good clothes around the house to fix things that don’t need fixing. Yet even as she rambles on, she becomes aware of something in the way Melba said “weeks, ages.” As if they aren’t different. As if they could just as easily be the same, for all she needs or cares. And then Sarah knows, all at once, what should have been the obvious truth all along: that the marriage was short-lived, that the husband probably didn’t last a year or two after that shirtless picture by the tree, that it was Melba who did all the moving around, that she’d been alone, that she’d been a seamstress for the last twenty-odd years, a damn good one, and that she came home for the same reason everybody comes home, but that in her case it wasn’t to chase her past; she merely wanted to live near it. That proximity itself was comfort.

That she’d been alone, probably many years alone, maybe even because she wanted to be. Sarah thinks of Walt, how often during the day she forgets all about him, but still he arrives every afternoon, breathing heavy at the back stoop, arms full of more junk they’d never need; he arrives, always, some afternoons knocking on the door with his head because he’s got no free hand. And yes, she feels pity, but Sarah’s first instinct is to rub Melba’s unchanged face in everything she doesn’t have, to unbuckle her handbag and wave pictures of Rhoda. Rhoda’s report cards, her hundred boyfriends, her Honor Society pins, her still-life drawings of fruit and vegetables…

They make small talk about the shop and some things Melba’s working on. She’s doing Nina Shetzer’s daughter’s wedding party. (An absolutely horrid plum! The bridesmaids are going to look like the walking wounded.) But after a couple of awkward, too-long silences, Sarah can’t keep herself from blurting, “I hate myself for saying this, Melba, but the girls all talk about your life like it’s a train wreck.”

Melba laughs and swoops her arm in an arc to damn them all, every last one of them, to hell. And what’s incredible is that even her voice is the same, thick and direct like a man’s, like the rocks she used to fling into the Watuppa. “Tell them I was never a whore. Tell those yappies that.”

Sarah doesn’t nod, only stares back at her and seeks forgiveness from Melba’s eyes for the curse of being no better than everybody else, for reveling in such a miraculous and perfect failure. She thinks of the early postcards, the black-and-white photographs, Melba’s zigzagged scrawl: Darling Sarah, We’ve moved to a place called Wabash in Indiana. We live in a house on a small hill overlooking a dirty rushing river. Reminds me a bit of home, but the rivers are so much smaller here. Please write! I don’t know two souls here. Your M

“Not one of them ever once called you that. Not one.”

But Melba’s still laughing at the thought and doesn’t care if they did or they didn’t. She scoots her stool closer, leans, and squeezes Sarah’s wrists. Her palms are hot and wet from work.

Birth of a Son-in-Law

AND THEIR DAUGHTER married Arthur Mendlebaum. The wedding was at Beth El in Fall River, and Walt and Sarah Kaplan were dressed to the nines, beaming. Sarah directing traffic, Walt telling jokes he either read in a book or stole from Alf Dolinsky. Rhoda one enormous smile in white — though to Sarah’s horror she’d pinned up her train at the last moment. Arthur’s family, cranky rich Rhode Islanders who looked down their noses at Fall River, at the musty temple, at the murmuring rabbi in his soup-stained jacket. At the Kaplan relatives and their Russian accents, at Walt’s made-up Yiddish that was really pigeon Portuguese he’d picked up from stock boys at his store. But Arthur himself was a peach, a good old boy who could pal around with Walt until Walt exhausted himself with stories. Sarah said Walt loved Arthur more than Rhoda, if only because Arthur was the first person in Fall River history who’d never once yawned in his face, said she’d be happy if they’d have him down to New York to take the load off her ears once in a while. Of course, this was bull; at home, with nobody around, it was Sarah’s yap that drilled his ears and Walt who’d hunker in his study with his maps and atlases. But talk is talk at a wedding, and Walt said, “Anytime I’m invited I’ll come down there and bore Arthur to so many tears he’ll sleep in his office to escape me.” And Arthur said, “For God’s sake, Walt, you’re the least dullest guy from here to Worcester” (pronouncing it Worster), and everybody yucked as if he was the next greatest Jewish comic. Sarah laughed loudest, her patented guffaw, her whale honk. Arthur was taller than any Jew she’d ever known, much less been related to. He laughed because he liked to laugh. He pinched Rhoda when he thought nobody was looking. He looked at other girls when he thought nobody was looking. He was a healthy strapper who was going to be rich! Didn’t everybody know he had a job working on the Stock Exchange in New York? Rich, rich, rich, rich, rich. Arthur is going to be rich and Rhoda is going to have babies and speak French to them. Why Rhoda went around speaking that French, Sarah had not an iota of an idea (though it was true that she often told her friends, “Well, you know, Rhoda is truly a genius at the French language”). All she really knew was that her daughter was going to have a house in the suburbs of New York, a real house with more than two trees and more than one bathroom. In a place called Rye Bread, Walt insisted on calling it. My daughter is leaving a city named after the mighty confluence of two rivers for a place named after a sandwich. But Rhoda said no, it was only called Rye. Rye, New York. A place with shaggy trees, wide boulevards, no dead mills (our rat hotels, Walt calls them) — a place with no jobs, only houses and trains. Trains to take men in hats to work in the city and trains to take them home.

The reception is in the basement of Walt’s Elk Lodge. The two of them stand in front of the empty trophy case, watching. Walt elbows her. “Want another hot dog on a stick?”

“Yes.”

“Another glass of champagne?”

“Yes.”

“Kiss on the kissa?”

And Walt, hot dog — mouthed, kisses her and the people dance and her daughter floats by whispering elegant nonsense, and even the Elk’s cheap chandelier is high-class. They’ve killed Kennedy and we might be in a new war. Nobody seems to know for sure except Walt, who says, “Absolutely we are, don’t let anybody fool you, it’s war.” Either way, all that counts is that Arthur’s got two bum knees and glasses thick as dictionaries. Walt says they can’t make him go anywhere. Rhoda’s got the best figure of any girl here, even better than Dotty Packer’s niece, the one marrying that hoodlum from Swansea. Walt chomps another hot dog on a stick, holds up the stick, and looks at it. “I could have invented this. I’d have bought you an island with the money.”

Rhoda prances over like an excited colt. She’s dragging Arthur by the hand. Her face is plump and cherry and maroon and pink from lipstick kisses. “Mother, I want you to dance with Arthur. I’ll whirl Daddy.”

Sarah closes her eyes and lets this giant sway her. His big hands grip her waist, and Lord, she feels things she shouldn’t. She whispers, “Hurt a hair on her head and I’ll pry out your eyes with a shrimp fork.” Arthur cackles and squeezes her tighter, and she loves it, the squeezing. The husband of my daughter only an hour. She’ll take this to the grave, but right now, Sarah lets it ooze through her like the champagne. She’s exhausted and lusty, and what else is there in this world? Someone digs a long nail into her shoulder and whispers, “Congratulations, Mrs. Mother-in-Law,” and without opening her eyes she sees everything. Those snoots, the in-laws, hiding at their table, wishing they were back in Rhode Island; Walt hamming, doing his strange version of the rumba, while the rest of the room slow-dances to “Love Me Tender.” So many cars in the Elk’s parking lot people had to park over at the Al Mac’s. The bandleader’s shoulders, tight in a tuxedo three sizes too small for him. The wiggle of the chandelier tears. The way they swing light. She created this. She never wanted an island. She wanted this.

Arthur’s steamy chocolate breath on her neck, his limp and his bad eyes that protect him from people who want to send him away to get killed. And he will take Rhoda up in these arms tonight, but he won’t smother her, even though he’s so huge his Abraham Lincoln feet don’t fit on the bed. She can hear his big shoes thump and the tink tink of Rhoda’s white heels landing. And she can hear Rhoda sigh. Like her father, she’s always been melancholy. All of this will finally make her sad, and Arthur will know this but not understand. And Rhoda won’t explain it to him because she doesn’t know enough to explain. He will accidentally knock the clock over with a klutzy elbow, and Rhoda will grab him as he leans over and order, Leave it, the clock, leave it. And they will leave the clock on the floor and the light on, too, and they will love and push and grip and pull and wander and twist and love it and love it, and maybe hurt, too, in each other’s bodies until finally exhaustion creeps and overtakes. But their sleep will not be peaceful, because in it they will leave each other. And before dawn they will wake up tired in the flood of lamplight, and for too many moments they will be wretched and wonder why silently, without telling the other, because they won’t understand, because they’re too young to understand, because it takes years to understand — she thinks of Walt, who will hide in the Men’s and wheeze after this dance — why the morning will always be harder than the nights.

At the Conrad Hilton

WALT. Mesmerized by Uncle Alf Dolinsky’s feet. Dolinsky is lying on his bed in his newly polished brogans, enjoying himself. What’s there not to enjoy? It’s summer and they’re at the Conrad Hilton. Walt and Alf Dolinsky in Chicago for the National Furniture Retailer Association’s annual convention. Yet there’s a glitch. Walt’s standing again for vice president. Nobody ever runs against anybody, the votes are a formality, only this year he’s facing a challenge from an upstart barely out of his twenties, sells period furniture in Cincinnati. Alf says the kid’s a maggot, sells antiques, for Christ sake, and hasn’t got a Good Humor’s chance in hell of getting elected. But Walt knows better. He’s been around long enough to know that the only thing left to become after making it anywhere in this world is a has-been, and he’s already served on the association’s board ten years — was even president from ’57 to ’59—and now there’s this pimple-face telling every buttonhole in the hotel lobby about the need for new blood. And the old blood? It’s another death knell, the bell that’s been donging in Walt Kaplan’s ears for more years than he wants to remember. Walt Kaplan? What ever happened to him? Guy could sell you the hole in a doughnut.

“Period furniture,” Walt says finally. “New stuff, just looks old. If he sold antiques, he wouldn’t be a retailer.”

“Only you could find a way to worry in Chicago,” Alf says.

Walt doesn’t move, only stands there bending back his thin, pale fingers — his father once said he had a woman’s hands because they were so small and always cold. He’s still entranced by Alf’s clodhoppers. Dolinsky’s greatest joy, lying on a bed in his shoes. Maybe this is why he comes on these trips in the first place, because if he pulled this at home, his wife, Doris, would bust his jaw. Uncle Alf, a real uncle once, to his nephew Gary, Charlie’s son, the one who died exercising. Walt always knew that stuff would kill you.

“It isn’t that.”

“Not what?”

“The kid from Ohio.”

Now it’s Alf who turns silent, who stares at the ceiling, then the window. The city’s below them, crawling lights and honks. Even up here they can hear the doorman whistling for cabs. The window’s open, and a breath of damp wind grazes Alf’s cheek. He watches it toss the drapes, billow them, and he thinks of a dress that once did that, furled as it turned away from him. A dress he once called Eva Pearlmutter.

“We’ve been friends how long?” Alf says.

Walt murmurs, “Long time.”

“Gimme a figure.”

“I don’t know. Since McKinley.”

“Thirty-four years and a month and a half. It was June your brother beat up my brother.”

“All right, thirty years.”

“So knock it off.”

Walt paces. The room’s got red carpet and white walls. They say every room at the Conrad Hilton’s different, but his room is always the same: red carpet, white walls, brass bed. Not decorated like the kind of place for two wash-ups to be alone together, but being with Alf is almost the same as being by yourself, only slightly smarter. Besides, there’s lots of times he’d rather be alone with Alf Dolinsky than Sarah, hotel room or no hotel room. Doris calls Alf the Flabby. She says, Where’s the Flabby today? Oh, the Flabby wants another piece of salami, doesn’t the Flabby? He works for Dave Rubin’s cookie company, but his toughest job is being Walt Kaplan’s best friend. They’ve already bought graves, side by side, in the newer old Jewish cemetery across from the Arco Station up President Avenue.

Alf cradles the back of his head and watches Walt clomp across the room, from the window to the door and back again. Alf talks to the ceiling: “Long time since we had one of these. A what’s-it-all-for night! All right, Walt. You want the inventory or the philosophy first? I think we started with philosophy last time, so why not the inventory tonight?”

“Knock it—”

“Number one, your beautiful daughter Rhoda, cream of everybody’s crop. Number two, your beloved wife, roaring Attila that she is; number three, your store, the grandest furniture palace this side of the Narragansett.”

“I don’t give a damn about the kid from Ohio.”

“Then don’t stand. Step down, retire, give a speech, let them give you a watch.”

Walt notices the lampshade on the night table’s been burned by the bulb. Some maid turned it around so nobody would see it, but this place is crawling with furniture guys.

First thing we’re going to do is inspect the accouterments. Classy operation. This place is world-famous? Still, he likes the way the frayed edge scallops the light on the wall.

Still pacing he says, “Like something in my brain’s a little off. I got these ghosts in the corners of my glasses.”

“Huh?”

“They follow me around. They’re not anything I can see, they’re empty. And they’re not in the room, they’re in my glasses.”

“I don’t get it.”

“What’s not to get? I see things and I don’t see things.”

“You’re melancholy, Walt. Lots of guys are melancholy. Why don’t you clean your glasses?”

“So much I feel like I miss, Alf.”

“Like what?”

Without stopping, Walt shrugs. He reaches the window and spins. His face lightens. “Hong Kong.”

“What about it?”

“I want to go there.”

“So go.”

“You don’t want to go to Hong Kong?”

“I never thought about it.”

“See, there’s your problem. You lack imagination.”

Alf adjusts his pillow, sighs. “It isn’t Sarah? These ghosts in your glasses?”

Walt stops pacing. “Who said anything about Sarah?” He stands in front of the bed and looks down again at Alf, now into his face and also at his big ears, ears that have stuck out like a monkey’s since he’s known him. “Maybe I’ve got a girl,” Walt says, “Porta-geese girl. Maybe I’ve got one in New Bedford.”

Alf sits up, keeps his feet straight so that to Walt he looks like a fat mummy in expensive shoes. They’d planned to have a drink in the bar downstairs, go someplace for dinner, maybe take a walk down State Street and see the Marshall Field’s windows. They’ve always gotten a huge kick out of Chicago, where selling’s more of an art than it is in Massachusetts. Forget art, it’s religion here, kill or be killed, and the old rules don’t apply, and your name and pedigree don’t matter a hoot to anybody. Christ, they let the Jews own half this city, including Sears Roebuck, although they keep Julius Rosenwald’s name out of the name. Every other year the convention’s in Chicago, and Alf, though he sells cream-filled cookies, not dinette sets, always joins him. Last time they gave Alf an honorary NFRA lapel pin. They’ve been friends how long? How many trips like this have they taken? But Walt’s moody, always has been. Not that many people know it.

“If it’s bothering you this much, take it to Jordy Tomason. He’ll rig it. Jordy’s not going to want that piglet yammering anyway. Never seen you so worked up about something like this. What do they give you, anyway? Some free magazines? Some wholesale discounts you’d probably finagle even if you weren’t on the board?”

“How do you know I don’t have a Porta-geese girl in New Bedford?”

In the room, it’s getting hotter. Both men’s hats are on the radiator. They look like big mushrooms. Alf watches Walt with the old sympathy, but also with bitterness. This happens sometimes — he sees his friend with his wife’s eyes. Doris, who’s never been satisfied. With the money Alf’s father never had to leave them, with Alf never amounting to anything more than one of five vice presidents, with his not-so-secret lust over women long dead or who are so far away they may as well be. And now here’s Alf with Dorry’s eyes spoiling things at the Conrad Hilton, making him wish he’d had a better, stronger friend all these years, a man with more gusto, a man with more take charge, a man with—

“If it was a girl,” Alf says, “it would be easy. If it was a girl, I’d cure you for nothing.”

Walt breathes and steps back, lets the wall catch him. He slumps. Rambles on more to the carpet than Alf: “Not even twenty-one. Still lives with her mother and swears like a sailor. Got a little black mustache soft as the whiskers of Rhoda’s dead cat. And legs, Alf, you should see her legs. Legs enough to make dead harpooners try to scratch out of their graves. Because she loves, Alf, swear to God, to dance in the old marine cemetery out near Pancher’s Nursery. Her name is Edna, but she doesn’t look like an Edna. Her parents wanted her to be an Edna, but she’s no Edna. She’s got spiff. She blazes. She’s like the sun, Alf. The sun! ‘A fair hot wench in flame-colour’d taffeta!’ ”

Alf looks at the floor, where there’s one black sock. It could be either his or Walt’s — there’s no way to tell — they both shop for their socks at Pffaf’s. To hell with Horseneck Beach, you can drown on Michigan Avenue, in nonsense, in Ednas who never breathed. Guy as big a walrus as I am, sinking into the fancy carpet. Alf would give him a hand if he could reach him from the bed.

Instead, he only pleads, begs, “Damnit, Walt. Chicago. We’re in Chicago.”

Awnings, Bedspreads, Combed Yarns

EYES SAUCERED by blue-gray half circles, Walt Kaplan watches them knock down City Hall in the name of progress. September 1971. The day is cloudless, the sky white. A helicopter dive-bombs like a horsefly and snatches the great gold eagle from the top of the dome and the crowd hollers, whoops, and the ball attached to the crane swings, the ball swings, and like a flatfoot man defenseless against a sidelong punch from nowhere, the old granite eyesore begins its inward crumble. The roar after each hit like the loudest bowling Walt’s ever heard. The men beside him on the sidewalk, in front of the post office, slap their hands and cheer and stomp their shoes and whoop some more. Nobody’s seen anything like this. The ball swings toward them, a freakish pendulum, and everybody takes a couple of steps back.

Murder is what this is. In fifty years of being alive and walking these streets, how many times a day did he look at this building? Though Walt’s known the worst times, he’s always been one to climb the rungs of the pit. During the hurricane of ’38, though he was young then, he’d laughed as trees took flight and roofs and chimneys landed in neighbors’ yards. Even now, they still call him a crack-up, the genuine article, a real Wisenheimer. At the annual masked poverty ball at the Legion, who knew what he’d show up in. A couple of years ago he went as Salvini the Elder and Salvini the Younger at the same time, painted two extra eyes on his cheeks — all the women were screaming. Last year he somehow jammed himself into his sister-in-law’s tutu. A man with half a million useless stories, Sarah says. (His favorite being how his father, dirty-faced Jewish kid from Lithuania, gets off at the wrong train station, fifteen years old, and thinks he’s in Boston, wanders around Fall River looking for Blue Hill Avenue in Dorchester. And what doyouknow? By the mid-twenties, Kaplan’s Furniture’s got the biggest showroom in Fall River by five thousand square feet. Branch stores at 344 Columbia and the corner of Pleasant and 4th.)

Beloved store that was his, Walt’s, until ten days ago, when they knocked it down, too. Then there were no photographers, no police, no cheers, no helicopter swooping, only Walt, sweat-furious hands in his pockets, watching. “Exercising the state’s right of eminent domain,” the Department of Public Works lawyer had said slowly, as if the words were too difficult for a shopkeeper to understand. But he’d fought them for two years before he lost, in court, the right to own his own property. Then — because the law so ordered — they gave him a quarter of what the store was worth in the name of the good of the Commonwealth. In this country! You’d think Khrushchev was governor. And the idiot mayor proclaims Fall River will be a champion again. A return to the greatness of Spindle City, the Textile Capital of the World. That the new I-95 extension will be the greatest boon since Colonel Durfee opened his first cotton mill at Globe Corners in 1811.

The ball strikes, and the twin sets of pillars that lorded the front door crack and topple.

Of course he’s not the only sap who knows that nothing they do is going to reopen a single mill. That a highway’s so people can drive through Fall River, not to it. He doesn’t corner the market on detecting bull when it froths out politicians’ mouths. But others who know the truth, his brother, Leon, for example, gave it up. Leon, who is where right now? On a beach? The government’s going to build what the government wants to build. You forgotten the pharaohs? May as well dig up F.D.R. and blame him. May as well go fishing in the Taunton with your pinkie.

But today, if nothing else, Walt insists on being up close to the destruction. This wafting of a hundred-some-odd years of undisturbed dust. He breathes it in, almost enjoying it, like sniffing the sweet rot at the back of Sarah’s refrigerator.

And it goes far beyond the killing of his livelihood. That the route the DPW and the city council finally agreed upon went smack through Kaplan’s, but somehow, like some miracle of Jesus, avoided Nate Lyons’s Furniture Warehouse not a quarter mile away on Granite Block. Not to mention all the banks in town, and Sharder and Nolte’s, Small Brothers, L. D. Wilbur’s, Boyko Typewriters and Adding Machines…Mr. Kaplan, be reasonable. All citizens, at one time or another, must make sacrifices for the sake of the common achievement…That they forced him, a self-employed man, to go to work for Sarah’s fascist cousin Morris, the broker. Broker of what? Anything you can stick a price on, honey. That they turned him into a lackey with hardly an office, a peephole with a desk crammed in — with that little Führer speeching at him all day about how he’s never met less of a striver than Walt Kaplan. (“That’s how you lost the branches, kiddo. You’re slow on your feet. Don’t forget the highway didn’t take away your daddy’s branches. You lost them long before.”)

The ball smashes the clock below the dome, the clock that was always slow. Everybody in town adjusted their watches to it, and Fall River was known as the town that was seven minutes off. How fast it takes to kill. There’s an explosion followed by a loud sucking noise as the dome, screeching glass and grinding, caves in.

The joke is that nobody loves this city more. When he was a kid they’d say their pledge of allegiance, and then Mrs. Gerstadt would ask in singsong, Now, children, what makes our city so wondrous special? He can still chant the chant: Awnings, bedspreads, combed yarns, curtains, knitwear, shirts, sweaters, bathrobes, handbags, corsets, drapes, mattresses, braids, roll covers, sport clothes, thread, raincoats, plastics, furniture, luggage, underwear, industrial textiles!

Nearly blinded by the dust, sneezing, he finally turns away, and the clack of his shoes is empty defiance. But he’ll take it. He laughs, and it scalds his throat. A funeral now, and I’m a mourner. Our fair City Hall. Born in 1845. The mother, a Flemish architect. Mrs. Gerstadt’s toothless grinning: Not from Flemland, but from where? Children? Where does a Flemish person call home?

And didn’t his father walk him through the long corridors, fingering portraits of dead old turkey-throated mayors as though the Buffingtons and Fozzards were Washingtons and Jeffersons? The echo beneath the dome. The way a whisper became a murmur became a shout.

He’s due at work, but after what he’s seen? Over the phone yesterday Leon said, “Why torture yourself? Get out of town for the day. Take Sarah to Boston. Buy her a steak at Jimmy’s. Enjoy yourself half a day in your life. It’s over, over.”

Before his brother left, as the two of them were clearing out the last of the inventory and adjusting the books, Walt had snarled, “What kind of person moves to Florida to live?”

“Is that a question?”

“Enlighten me, grace me.”

And Leon had sat in their father’s ancient swivel chair and raised his legs and whirled the way they used to when they were stock boys. Cause it’s warm. Cause Bets loves it there. Cause her sisters live there, even though she hates them. Cause we’ve got the apartment in Fort Myers paid for. Cause they’re driving the goddamned autobahn through our store. Because this town’s not through dying. Cause I put a little money away. Unlike you. Cause it’s warm.

Not going back to the peephole today, because having to listen to that Morris would only drive the stake deeper. Cousin Morris, so kind to give you a job, Sarah says. You know he can’t afford to go around giving handouts. How can you complain when it’s honest work? And Walt saying, You don’t understand, it’s just talking. Moving money around. Not the kind of work I’m used to. Honest work, she says, as if his thirty-seven years of selling furniture was stealing from people.

Still listening to the crushing, preposterous warlike barrage, he walks down Third Avenue (avoiding South Main, where there’s a hole where his store used to be) and across Rock Street. Then up Union Avenue. Halfway up the hill, the clamor becomes mercifully more faint, as though the tired clapboards are soaking up the sound. Christ Almighty, I’ll stomp to Kansas City. Pains everywhere, but legs like tree stumps. He leans into the hill and marches. He salutes an old salty out on her porch, and she fumbles with her glasses and smiles. The decrepits always went for him. He could sell a newfangled recliner with all the bells and whistles to a crocker on her last legs. Die with your feet up, my royal lady, and don’t forget we now also carry Congoleum Rugs and Gruno Refrigerators. He marches on. Prices so low, your conscience will bother you. He knows every tree stump, every graffitied initial. Knows who laid the cement for the sidewalk without looking down and reading the patinaed bronze plaque: O’CONNOR AND ANGELL, CONTRACTORS, FALL RIVER, 1893.

And he reaches 100 Delcar, and he’s home but not home. Sarah can’t see him, or there’d be all kinds of shrieking. What kind of man’s not at work at 2:30 in the afternoon on a Monday? He creeps around back and hides behind the boulder. Collapses faceup on the grass. He can hardly keep up with his own breathing as the damp seeps through his pants. The kitchen window’s open. The pooh-bah’s on the telephone. He feels the rock against his head. He sees the ball’s slow hover and Sarah’s plump fingers twisting the phone cord. Sees his brother spinning around in a chair in a room that no longer exists — and still Sarah talks. Our whole caboodle’s getting bashed to hell, and it’s caving, yes caving. But my scrumptious porkette’s big mouth’s keeping talking. “I didn’t tell her casserole was a bad idea, only that it might be wrong for the occasion, and Lorraine says why am I meddling in the food, and I said I’m overall chairman, and she says then why don’t you worry about being chairman, and I said that’s what I’m doing, worrying, and she says well, don’t worry, and I said well, which is it, worry or don’t worry?” He sinks further into the wet ground, loving her. He wants to climb in through the window and prance her around the kitchen bellowing like a lunatic, drag her upstairs, pull the shades, bite off her buttons, let the phone ring till it kills itself. And laugh, laugh. But he’s a stowaway in his own yard, and also, much as he tries, much as he needs the rescue of it, he can’t turn his quickened breathing into anything other than an old man’s gasps.

High Priest at the Gates

WALT USED TO STAND outside the cemetery gates and smoke, because under some ancient law from the Talmud that he happily took advantage of, but never fully understood, he wasn’t permitted to enter cemeteries, because he, Walt Kaplan, was a Kohen, a genuine descendant of high Hebrew priests. Of course he got a bang out of being royalty. He used to go around sometimes licking his finger and anointing people duke of this, duchy of that, even called Alf Dolinsky “my liege.” When Dolinsky said that’s not Hebrew, Walt said even the pope doesn’t preach to his flock in Latin anymore. “Benevolent eminences like myself have to change with the times.” Once, during Sarah’s Aunt Ida’s graveside service — Ida was so old for so long that most people forgot she hadn’t died yet and were genuinely shocked when it happened — Walt put on one of those Burger King crowns and greeted people after the service with a gloved hand and a blessing, till Sarah whispered that if he didn’t take that thing off in two seconds she’d rip his head off. But it was also out there with his pack of Kools, in front of the gates, across the street from the gas station, that Walt would ruminate on all the time he was going to have to spend inside the gates, among those graves, inside a cheap casket from Gould’s. His status as a member of the Kohanim applied only to his living flesh; dead he was the same gone schlump as everybody else. And even on the day Ida was disappearing into that irregularly mowed grass forever (he could hear Rabbi Gruber intone his stock line: “We shall always remember the cheerful countenance of the deceased”), he couldn’t help comparing the time we spend there, and working the whole thing out in his head for the nine millionth time and thinking again: Nasty joke. Here’s your body. Now watch it die. Watching the crowd of mourners through the gates and wanting to shout that they all had it backward. Clowns, it’s us, the ones still paying taxes, who need some honoring. It’s the lucky stiffs in the ground — Ab Sisson, Teddy Marcowitz, Pearl Brodsky, Lou Jacobs, Hyman Sobiloff, and now even poor Ida — who should show more respect. They’re the ones who should be huddled and bundled and murmuring and remembering. They’re the ones who should be blowing snot in their hands. All Ida and the rest of the sleepers deserve is a handshake goodbye, maybe a peck on the cheek farewell, because for them it’s a simple matter of going away, of leaving, of forgetting keys, wallet, driver’s license, cash — an easy vamoose. You want sorrow? Out here! He wants to roar it at the backs of the mourners. Turn around! Out here beyond the gates, suckers! Turn around!

In the Dark

IN THE DARK she lights a match. She looks at herself in the reflection in the window. The flame is jumpy and fickle because she’s breathing on it. Yet it stays lit until it burns down to her fingers, and she watches herself in the uncertain light and sees a face too large and blanched, like an unwelcome moon. The house so still and mute even the kitchen clock’s terrible grinding is muffled. She’s downstairs in the new room, the TV room, the room they remodeled in the fifties. Walt’s upstairs muttering snores like a sea cow. It’s two o’clock in the morning and she whispers something even she can barely hear: “What for?” What her mother used to say, first thing she ever said in the mornings, even before her father got sick, as though asking it of God. “What for? You tell me what for?” Her mother who died of grief for a daughter who only ran away down the block. But why now? Why Sarah asking? She thinks of Rhoda’s tiny munching lips at her nipples, remembers those grabby little hands — in this very room — all that need. And now? It isn’t that. She doesn’t want that need back. It’s some other more undefined ache. Something else, like being haunted by the dying light of the match, by her love, by her desire even now to knead Walt’s skin, even now to whisper in his sleeping ear — what? — that she’s here, that Sarah’s here, whisper, I’m here, I’m here. Because so much is occurring to her tonight and she can’t sleep while the house drowses. Sarah lets the silence soak her into its blur, as if she were descending slowly through water. But she’s never in her life been capable of whispering, of capturing a windless moment, and she fears he doesn’t know this about her, that she can simply sit, in the dark, the radio off, and can, yes, can, consider that her life with him has been exactly that, a life, and life’s not something you measure in good or bad. Her life with Walt a life — and if she could simply say — but that’s not it either. He wouldn’t want to hear about it, would shrug her away. “Whatayou talkin? Sarah? Whatayou talkin?” No, she would like to do it with a look that doesn’t need explanation or interpretation, but instead would simply make him remember. He’s such a writer down of things, such a clutcher of nonsense; the man has files of pictures of furniture, of tables and chairs he sold thirty years ago, stuff already on a dump heap — but there are so many things he doesn’t remember, because he never thought about them when they were happening. A year and a half ago now his brother Leon died in her arms because his wife, Bets, couldn’t bear it any longer, and when Walt came into that white room he didn’t look at his brother. He looked at Sarah — pleaded with her, as if she were suddenly the God with answers her mother was always talking to — and he doesn’t remember, because he wasn’t there when it was happening, and even now, when he rambles on about himself and Leon making illegal whiskey in a cowshed — as if Fall River ever had a cowshed in the past hundred years, as if he ever drank illegal whiskey — it’s so he won’t remember anything he really remembers about a brother dying before him. Love, isn’t it enough to describe? What for? Remember you holding me and me holding your dead brother and your eyes searching mine for some answer and me giving the only answer I knew how to give, which was to grip both of you, the living and the dead, and then, yes — you won’t remember this because you weren’t there when it was happening. I dropped him on the pillow and gripped you harder, and you dug your head into the nook of my shoulder and you wept no. Your brother who died too young because he went to Florida, state full of nothing but oranges and corpses; the man should have known, you said — I dropped him on the bed and gripped you and you wept no and you’ll never remember.

Atlantic City

SARAH COMES HOME for lunch after her volunteer shift at the register in the hospital gift shop and finds Walt dead on the floor of their bedroom. He has been dead for at least two hours. His second and last heart attack, and from this one there was no turning back. The man turned fifty-nine only three months ago. This is September 1975. It has been a long morning, Friday mornings always are, and Sarah’s feet hurt. She kneels beside his body and lifts his wrist to check for his pulse, even though she knows from looking at him. She knows. The way she knows it’s morning through the thick drapes of a strange hotel room. The way she knows it’s bad news by the way the phone rings mid-ring. Walt is dead. He is too young. He is dead. He is on his back with his suit pants on, sprawled, as though he went with fight. He clutches his wallet in his left hand. His teeth are still good and white. His shoes are polished. His tie is crooked, but tight and confident up to his big Adam’s apple. He could be a toppled wax statue. He’s wearing his watch. His hands are not clammy. He’s wet himself. But still, he could be sleeping on the floor. He could be napping. He could have fallen, tripped, knocked his head against the telephone table and conked himself out. She rests an ear on his chest, not to listen for any movement of his dead exploded heart, but because she is suddenly so weary and he has been her fat pillow all these years. Though she doesn’t want to sleep. She wants to rest awake. She sits up and takes off her shoes, then settles her head on his chest again, on his blue sea horses tie, on his sprawl. It isn’t comfortable because of the angle, but she doesn’t adjust. She remains still and listens to her own breathing. A bit quickened, but not hysterical, nothing even close to that. Other women, she thinks, would get hysterical. Run around moaning, dial telephone numbers furiously, shriek. The fools, she thinks, showy fools. Dingbats, Walt would call them. Dingbat chickens bawk-bawking. Walt, she thinks, too many sirloins at the Magoni’s in Somerset. How many Howard Johnson hot dogs on a buttered bun? Ate, ate, ate like a happy hog across your life, and now I’m here. I could murder your head. You want to see tears? You want them to drop on your shirt so you can feel them on your skin? Didn’t I tell you that time in Atlantic City that you waddled like an old man, that you needed to rest too much. You couldn’t walk the boardwalk without getting so tired, and now look at you, Walt, can’t even make it to work. That time in Atlantic City you laughed at me and said who the hell needs walking anyway. Bought us both another double cone. Pounded your chest and said, You got to live while you live. And that was all well and good for you. You don’t have to come home to you like this. I have to come home to you. Walt. Atlantic City. Why Atlantic City now? That time in Atlantic City with Bernie and Nina Sadow. You on the beach. The only one of us who’d swim. Bernie had some kind of skin condition. Who knew with that man. It was always something. And God, that Nina. Didn’t stop talking to take a breath the three days we were down there. About what? You said you never heard so much nonsense since Saul Graboys talked you into buying his lemon El Dorado. But you swam, darling. Bernie with his skin condition and his chain of what? Check-cashing stores? Wasn’t that it? Didn’t Bernie Sadow own a chain of check-cashing stores in Newark? What a business to be in, no wonder he had a skin condition. You splashing and shouting at us. I stayed on the beach because I couldn’t escape Nina’s mouth. Bernie sitting there bundled up like it was February in Warsaw, and you, my fat brave knight, my tub-a-lard warrior, in the water splashing, throwing a tennis ball to those shouting boys. Those boys leaping out of the water like pale white porpoises. You swam with those boys. Why Atlantic City now? We haven’t spoken to Bernie and Nina Sadow in how many years? You came back and shook your hair at us girls and said to Nina, Stop jabbering, woman. Stop! Come on, deadbeats, it’s the Fourth of July in Atlantic City! Nina wanted to go back to the hotel and play cards. Bernie didn’t want to do anything but tell strangers on the beach about all his ailments, that straw hat pulled down to his eyes, that huge coat, those big sunglasses. You said he looked like your Russian great-aunt escaped from the shtetl, Aunt Portia Bertobobovitch. At least that got a smile out of Bernie, but Nina barely heard it over her own blather, except to say to me, Oh, your Walt’s so hysterical. He’s really got to be the most hysterical of all the husbands. Of all the husbands, she said, and for once, even though she went right back to complaining about the food at the hotel, for once that blathering woman had an ounce of wisdom. You said, Bernie, my big Polish babushka. And Bernie said, I thought you said I was Russian. Because Bernie had a sense of humor, which was more than you could say for Nina. And you said, Poland, Russia, it all looks the same to a Jew on the run, and Bernie, who was sensitive and serious on that point, didn’t laugh, only said, Indeed. And later in the hotel you stood up on the bed with Q-tips sticking out your ears and mimicked Bernie’s indeed. Indeed, indeed, indeed — who does he think he is, the queen’s mother? Because Bernie was always finding new ways to remind people that he went to Harvard. But check cashing? Harvard College, Harvard Yard, and that’s how he ended up making a living? Oh my lovely, my lovely, my lovely.

Providence

SARAH GOTTLIEB leans against the passenger-side door of Walt Kaplan’s borrowed Ford Victoria. It’s a shutterthwacking Thursday morning in November 1938. Walt, clean-shaved, bandy-legged, stands on the sidewalk facing her, still not saying anything. So quiet now the only sound is the wind and the clack of the leaves somersaulting across bricks. Sarah is hefty, round-faced, and strong — mocking him with deviled eyes, tapping the toe of her high-heeled shoe on the running board of the car like a miniature hammer, her calf working, working. He’s also chubby, closer to all-out fat than she is; he makes a face when he sucks in his belly so that he can button his pants. Now he’s spreading his arms wide to form a huge bewildered Why? But still not speaking. Her face isn’t budging, so what’s the use of fighting back, of talking at her deaf ears. He grinds his teeth and involuntarily begs her name, mouths soundlessly, “Sarah.” She doesn’t bother to shake her head and certainly doesn’t need to use her voice to say no again. Her face: Never, never, never, never, never. What do I care? Plead all day. It’s still never, till hell freezes over and the goblins go ice-skating. Walt turns and looks at the pea-green house, sees the mother in the front window glaring. Which is worse, that ancient scowler or this hyena? Same face as the one in the window, only thicker and rosier. He wonders how a little flesh can make such a difference. That one in the window so far from beautiful he’d have to be chained and dragged to do the things that with this one he re-enacts in his head nightly, daily, afternoonly. He looks back at Sarah, who is now twirling a silver necklace around her pinkie. How could it have turned into this? She knows what we need to do. The paperwork’s filed. And didn’t she say three days ago that if she had to live in that putrid house another day she’d hang herself by the flagpole in front of Durfee High? Now he’s ready, everything’s ready, and here she is all done up and beautiful, lipstick and that hat, and all he can do is look daftly from her mouth to her knees, fat little knees he could eat without mustard. Because now it’s an unbudgeable no. Though it’s no more than twenty degrees, he’s sweating already in his new wool suit. Hasn’t opened his trap since he pulled the car up to the house and already sweating like his undershirted father ranting around the store. Except he’s here in broad daylight, on the sidewalk, pleading like the ignoramus she’s convinced him he is. Sarah continues to tap her feet, her little doomsday clock ticking, ticking, sucking up his courage by the gallon. And there’s nothing to say that he hasn’t begged for with his eyes already. That if she wants to run, he’ll run. That he’s got a car. (Yes, it’s his brother Leon’s, but at least till Sunday night it’s his.) Enough cash for the moment. A car and enough money. What else is there in this country? It’s never been a question of going very far. He has a decent job, and though the mother’s a witch, there are too many others in the family, too many friends; they can’t leave for good. Simply going away for a few days to make it all legal. But that feverish tap-tap-tapping, that face taunting him. He feels the mother’s eyes on the back of his head. Surrounded. Ambushed by women. Goddamnit, does he love this Sarah down to her shoes. God forgive him for wishing the mother a corpse already.

“Sare,” he says, though he hadn’t meant to. He’d meant to rehearse the final assault in his mind first, to get the sound right, somewhere in the gray between a bullyrag and a threat. But instead he only blurts, forcelessly, his voice octaves higher than he’s ever heard it, “Sare—”

Only then it comes:

“Awright already.”

Her voice, too, from somewhere other than her eyes and mouth, as though her throat rebelled before it could be hushed. A squeaked “Sare” answered by an irritated, but at the same time simple, unequivocal “Awright already.” Have ever more glorious words been spoken by a woman? That evil crone in the house must notice something in the way Walt’s shoulders go from clenched to juggly loose, because the next moment she’s kicking open the front door and shrieking. Sarah very nearly doesn’t have time to retrieve the little Samsonite she’s hidden in the bushes beside the house. What the mother screams at them, who knows amid the slamming doors and the flush of the Ford’s V-8? And their hyperventilating laughter, like two suddenly different people hurtling into that car. By the time the tiny shawled bundle of rage reaches the curb, Sarah and Walt are already sailing across Highland Avenue. To freedom, their first shared thought, as the car lunges forward, blurring houses, lawns, garages, a man raking leaves.

Left alone in front of the pea-green house, Frieda Gottlieb shouts at her staring neighbors, the frightened Portuguese housewives peering sneakily out their kitchen windows. Forever convinced that still, after generations, not one of the encroachers knows a single word of English, Frieda barks, like the schoolteacher she was a thousand years ago, “My daughter equals whore.” She snarls, “Daughter, whore. In English they mean the same thing.”

In the car they head toward Providence, Rhode Island, where the laws are easier. So long as you got a signed letter of consent from the marriageable woman to the court three days prior to the date of the proposed marriage, you could get a license in the morning, matrimony by afternoon. It was practically a money-back guarantee. You paid a little more than in Massachusetts, but the speed made up for that. Sarah’s practically asleep by the time they reach Tiverton. Her mouth is open and she’s breathing loudly, boisterously. Thirty-six miles from Fall River to Providence overland. Tiverton to Providence eighteen miles. Nine-thirty now. License by 11:00, married before 3:00 if the line’s not too long. In Rhode Island justices of the peace get paid by the marriage was what he’d heard, so they get you out of there with no dilly and no dally. After that, dinner at the Fore and Aft in Bristol. Then back to Providence to the Wachman Hotel, where Artie Shaw always stays when he’s in town. And then Arrivederci, nature! He swoops a breath. Hasta luego, woods by the Watuppa! Ciao, blankets and trees! A bed, a bed, a bed, a bed, a bed, a bed, a bed, a bed, a bed. A gust jolts them and the car swoons. Sarah opens her eyes and murmurs, “Stop kidnapping me, Walt. You have no right to kidnap.” He watches her pull her heels off and plop her feet, feet as big as his, on the dash. She yawns and droops her head again.

He thinks, The only bad thing about this is the secrecy. Of course he’d told Leon everything. In order to get the car and the days off from the store, he’d had to. This meant that Bets knew everything, too. But both Leon and Bets knew they weren’t to let anything out until Walt and Sarah got back from Rhode Island legitimate. Which meant the same thing in Massachusetts as it did in Rhode Island, because of the full faith and credit clause of the United States Constitution. Since he was going to have a wife instead of college, he was going to have to teach himself things. A marriage in Rhode Island’s a marriage in Massachusetts, and so on and so forth. But more important than the paper they’d bring home was getting the green light from Sarah to tell everybody. This was her show — she was the one with the mother. The Kaplans, upstarts, were supposed to feel lucky Sarah was allowing Walt into their fold, who cared how. Because Frieda Gottlieb, of course, was a different kettle of fish; her money was older. She had a lot less of it, but that didn’t matter. She might be locked away in that horrible green house in a neighborhood already gone to pot, but goddamnit it, her money was older, two generations older. The whole family, even the gang of pucker-faced cousins who talked like they were from England, make Walt squirm. And that Albert, always singing to himself, growing a full mustache at fifteen — even her little brother makes him nervous. The only one he likes is the dead father in the front hall picture, the one they all still talk to, good morning and good night, as if he’s still among the living. But that mother…a snake with hair and legs.

He dismisses them all from his mind and rubs the leather on the side of the door, whistles quietly. Nineteen years old and he doesn’t feel particularly old. But he doesn’t feel that young anymore either. It’s whole that he feels. More complete than yesterday. Yesterday, a day of trying on suits, shoes, ducking out of work early. Sarah’s hand rests on the seat near his knee and he reaches for her wrist but doesn’t touch it. Feet as big as his, but hands and wrists so small. Her wrists the daintiest thing about a girl not so dainty. He allows himself this moment where she can’t chastise him. “You aren’t marrying a ballerina,” she’d say if she noticed him admiring her wrists, which would mean more than the obvious. It would also mean he wasn’t marrying Bets, who used to dance ballet. Bets so light and tiny. Sometimes Leon carried her around on his palm like a waiter serving drinks. And yes, sometimes he does think about his sister-in-law’s legs, the way she leaps when she walks, the way she closes her knees together when she sits, splaying her little bird feet out, but that’s different, different.

Frieda Gottlieb tightens the shawl around her head by yanking on the ends. She stands in the front hall and looks at herself in the mirror and thinks of the ways Isadore went wrong with Sarah. The worst by far being that he took her to work with him. Let her play in the factory like a dirty-kneed Irish brat. Why did he raise her like she was a boy when he had a boy already? Grown man playing games with his daughter in a factory full of men and anybody has to ask where she went wrong? But wasn’t she a beautiful baby, all cheeks, big pouches drooping? Frieda examines her own face, not wrinkled so much as pressed in, as though her features are retreating into her head. The girl’s eighteen! Didn’t I love you, Poo? I didn’t play hide-and-seek with you and the grubby men who wanted to take you out in the field behind the factory and do unspeakables, but didn’t I love you? Frieda looks at herself, but she talks now to Isadore, whose picture, as always, lurks behind her, lording the front hall as he never did in life. Always more court jester than king, and maybe if he’d taken his own life more seriously for half a second, she wouldn’t be out there. Frieda listens to the slow creak of life as Albert begins his wake-up routine upstairs. Her late-sleeping son. So oblivious to anything that goes on in this house. Your sister’s run away for good today. Huh? What, Ma? Who’s runnin’ where? She listens to Albert in the bathroom, the pipes groaning and thwacking throughout the house, the plumbing another reminder of Isadore’s ineptitude. My daughter the slut with the little white suitcase her father gave her. Perhaps he knew how she was going to use it one day. Albert drops a glass on the bathroom floor. Yells, “Damnit! Ma!”

And she will not crawl back here no matter what monstrous else she’s carrying besides that suitcase.

Frieda looks at her face and touches her forehead as if to mark her own words. That’s what’s for certain. Banished. She can drown in her own stew out there, never here. Frieda goes to the kitchen for a broom and dustbin. Just before her face leaves the mirror, she sees those jowls, how they sagged off that beautiful child like popped balloons.

After he finds a space on Benefit Street behind the courthouse, Walt gently shakes her awake. Sarah opens her eyes slowly and realizes the car has stopped, that it’s happening. For the first time all day her eyes betray that she’s frightened. She has been since the moment she woke up and began furiously packing the suitcase, but she wasn’t foolish enough to let Walt know. She was well aware what impact her fear would have on his resolve. Walt so skittish. Puffs his chest like such a big man, but when it comes down to it, he’s scared of anything and everybody, especially her mother, who will twist her hands together for how long after this escape? Escape! As if this even resembled one. If what they were doing was escaping, they were like a couple of convicts breaking out and then stopping for coffee across the street from the prison. They weren’t forty miles from Fall River. After three nights in a hotel (of all of it, the news that they’d stayed in a hotel would torture her mother the most), they’d go home. To a little place he found on Weetamoe, the top half of a house that at least, thank God, wasn’t green. It was fading yellow, nearly white in the sun. Walt would take a risk only so far. But it made sense, didn’t it? His job. Our friends. But couldn’t we have gone and done this out of New England? So the fear in her eyes isn’t of her mother’s wrath, which can take a flying leap for all she cares. Let her yowl her head off. Let her rot in that house, with the neighbors hiding under their kitchen tables.

No, what Sarah’s afraid of is Monday afternoon, of being alone in that little furnished place on Weetamoe on Monday afternoon, of staring out the window at the corner. She sees herself watching some Italian kid jumping rope in the street. A little girl in a brown dress with big buttons that flops as she leaps. The girl, clean-faced but dirty all over, doesn’t see her, and wouldn’t think much if she had. Just another lady staring out the window like bored ladies do. But what choice do I have really? And aren’t I getting out of that house? Weetamoe’s only ten blocks up the hill from Robeson, but isn’t there a continent in those ten blocks? From her face, yes. Which is all that counts, though of course she also knows that a mother’s silent judgment reaches you wherever you are. That’d be true if she ran to Rio de Janeiro.

Walt doesn’t notice the glaze of fear in her eyes. He’s straightening his tie and tucking in his shirt as best he can while he’s still sitting in the driver’s seat.

“All right, banana,” he says. “Good sleep?”

She doesn’t say anything, just looks at him, curious at how someone can just plow along, unbogged. Not even fathoming what this is about, and it’s so obvious. Nostrils in a book his whole life, like her yeshiva-boy cousin Harry. Maybe reading shrinks Walt’s brain. She’s almost envious, and for a second she permits herself to be genuinely pleased. But she resists the urge to say something nice to him and slips on her shoes. She gets out of the car and takes in the huge red-brick courthouse, which according to Walt is famous in Providence because it dates back to the time of Roger Williams. Roger Williams, she thinks, another one who fled Massachusetts for postage-stamp Rhode Island. But at least he never got back in his canoe and went home to Monday morning. She stands on tiptoe and talks to Walt over the roof of the car.

“I wasn’t going to do this, you know.”

“Oh.” Walt lolls his head on the edge of the top of the car and watches her. He’s on the verge of smiling outright, but he’s unwilling to risk it.

“I only put my suitcase in the bushes in case I capitulated.”

He perks his head up. “So you capitulated?” Now he laughs. “Oh, Sare, I didn’t think you had it—”

“I didn’t say I did.”

“Oh.”

“I just changed my mind. You certainly didn’t convince me of anything. And you aren’t rescuing me either, so put your white horse back in the stable.”

“You’re as booby a meshuggeneh as your mother.”

She sniggers, but doesn’t say anything. Walt walks around the car and takes hold of her arms. She thrusts her head away, dramatically, like a girl in the movies who really wants to be kissed but doesn’t want to show it, except that Sarah doesn’t want to be kissed. Right now she doesn’t even want to look at him for fear that he will see what her joy looks like. Because even though she’s a little woozy now, it’s there, and it’s disgusting. Smack on her face in Rhode Island. He’ll see, and then he’ll kill himself trying to make it so she feels this way for three days straight. And God forbid longer. Which would not only be impossible, it would make her berserk. So to rid herself of joy, she imagines what’s to come. She thinks of the calculations. Hmmm, let’s see, if the baby was born in May, hmmmm, well, there’s November, December, January, February, March, hmmm…But even that’s a hell of a lot better than being invisible, and she thinks again of that girl skipping rope in the street, not even bothering to look up at the lady in the window. And she watches herself, Sarah, ram her fist through the glass to get that little snot’s attention.

“You want to walk around the block? Huh? My cauliflower? My eggplant, my Sallygirl? Wake up a little more?”

She doesn’t answer, only jerks from his grip and marches toward the looming steps. Walt, without hesitation, hustles into line behind her, smoothing his suit with trembling hands. She’s a plump, high-heeled Black Jack Pershing in a blue hat with white frills, and he’s a grinning doughboy who’d follow her into any slaughter without a second thought, mortar fire bursting, come what may.