Why can’t I just go on to college like everybody else? Certainly, I’m not going to follow through on this other wild and impossible thing? Somewhere along the line I’m pretty sure I’ll stop myself.
Grandma began telling me about the Rhapsody-in-Blue dinner-dance next Saturday night at the Ridgeway Country Club. Then she paused a long pause before saying, “Your Aunt Dorothy found you a blind date. He’s the son of one of her friends, Estelle Lubin. What’s the boychik’s name?” Grandma asked just as though he were one of my old friends.
“I never met him.”
“Well, you will, darling. His name is Lubin. Marshall Lubin. A very nice boy.” She went on talking about Marshall being a college boy from the University of Alabama.
It was then that the formally attired waiter brought Grandma’s “seafood supreme” and my shrimp cocktail—ninety-five cents for only six bored shrimps lounging on a bowl of cracked ice!
She told me that she’d like to buy me a new dress for the country club dance. Then she looked at me and sighed. “I want you should have a good time at the party.”
That was sure true enough. Grandma always wanted me to have a good time, but I’m not completely comfortable with that either. Did she want me to only because I’m eighteen and that’s natural enough, or was it because—is it that she still feels sorry for me?
I remember the first Sunday after I was released from Bolton and we all drove to Memphis to see Grandma. Rushing past my mother and even Sharon, she grabbed me with a strength that I’d never have guessed that she possessed. Then with a startling kind of abruptness, she released my arm to go dashing toward the kitchen. “Something’s burning” is what she had said, but the funny thing is I never smelled a thing.
Later, on the ride back to Jenkinsville, I thought a lot about her behavior. Finally it came to me that she must have suffered much more than embarrassment over my stay at the Bolton reformatory. I felt angry with her for trying to shield me from her suffering. Didn’t she realize that I could have helped her? Showed her that being there may have been a little bad, but it wasn’t all that terrible, for goodness’ sake!
But mainly I was angry with her because for all that time (and maybe that was the only really terrible thing) I didn’t know that anybody outside of Ruth really cared about my pain. Grandmother’s suffering would have shown me that she did.
But she’s like everybody else that way. More comfortable in expressing her anger than in exposing her sorrow. Once, I remember, she flared up at Grandpa and he said, “That’s a temper you have there.” And I caught her smiling as though she were still a young girl and Sammy Fried were nothing but a boy.
She adjusted the silk poet’s bow at her neck. “Maybe Estelle’s son ... uh ...”
“Marshall,” I supplied.
“Yes, Marshall,” continued Grandma, “could tell you all about the University of Alabama. Lots of the Jewish boys and girls from Memphis go there,” she said.
“You know, Grandma, I don’t think I would want to go there because ...” I want to go so far away from the South. Far enough away so that nobody has ever heard my name. “... because Alabama is too much like Arkansas. I’d like to try something else. Maybe New York. Maybe Boston.”
She smiled, but it was more out of nervousness than pleasure. “So far away?”
“Well, that’s okay,” I answered, trying to set her mind at ease. “I don’t want to go to college anyway.” Suddenly I felt as though I had backed away from a lizard into the carnivorous jaws of a crocodile.
Grandma blinked as though she were struck between the eyes. “Don’t want to go to college? Get an education. Meet—”
“It’s not that I don’t want to go!” When am I going to learn to keep my mouth shut? Good Lord, I can’t trust myself with anything!
“Then you do want to go?”
“Well ... I do maybe want to go some day, but I don’t want to go yet.”
“Sooo and why not?”
“Because I think ... it’s possible that I might have other plans.”
“Oh ...” Grandma made the oh sound all round and all inclusive. “Such as what?” And then she peered over the table to take in an unobstructed view of my midsection. Damn! She thinks just like them. Just like my father and mother! Me, who at eighteen would have more experience filling in for one of those vestal virgins than I would for Edna Louise Jackson in the back seat of Herbie Dickinson’s Chrysler.
“Grandmother.” I called her name with the same degree of firmness that teachers sometimes use with obnoxious students. “What I am thinking about is traveling. Seeing Europe. Stuff like that.”
“Europe?”
“Well, yes, maybe.”
“Why?”
“Oh, I don’t know ... no particular reason. I guess I’ve always wanted to travel, see foreign places.”
“I’ve seen them,” she said, looking out beyond The Skyway’s glass wall. “My whole family has. For so many generations my family lived in Wieliczka. A good word and a helping hand they had for everybody.” Grandmother touched her heart. “God is my witness, there was no better family anywhere. But the best of us was Judah! To this day I remember Judah. How handsome he was! Through fifty years, I can still see my brother’s face. Time plays no tricks.
“Your grandmother remembers it all. One night a Polish soldier so drunk he couldn’t find his way back to his garrison came galloping into Wieliczka. And to the people—our friends and neighbors that we’ve known all our lives—he tells them to ‘find Jews.’
“Find Jews.” Grandma gave a faint chuckle. “I cannot stop seeing Judah’s face the moment he was beheaded.
“After that my father vowed he’d get our family to a safe place, so giving up the tailor shop, he bribed his way out of Poland and into Luxembourg.
“It wasn’t all sunshine there, either, believe me. Poppa went through hard times, we all did until he established his business, but Poppa, alav hasholom, was a good tailor and a good businessman. Soon from all over Luxembourg City, the smart people began coming to his shop. Gott’danken.
“Later my sisters Toby and Miera both married doctors and I followed young Sammy Fried to America. My sisters and I stayed close over the years. Once or twice a week we wrote; five times they came to America to visit me. Then Hitler, like a plague, marched into Luxembourg, and I never again heard from anyone.”
“I know, Grandma, I’m sorry.”
Without in any way acknowledging my belated expression of sympathy, Grandma went on talking. “My mother, my sisters, their husbands, eight children, and twelve grandchildren ...”
“I know,” I said again, but this time feeling Grandma’s sorrow for our family beginning to re-ignite my hatred for all those who had ever persecuted my people.
She looked directly at me as though she could see things I couldn’t. “You don’t know! To know is to know that the old countries are bad for the Jews. Poles, Russians, Germans, they’re all the same, not caring about right or wrong. Only doing what they’re told. And twice as fast when the instructions come from a uniform.”
She pointed to the high-school age busboy who wore gold braided epaulets on the shoulders of his red jacket. “If that pimpled boy wearing that fancy jacket would today go to Germany and order the people, God forbid, to find Jews, people would do what they were told. They would find Jews.”
“I understand that,” I answered, thinking that I would like nothing better than to spend my life personally tracking down all the Nazis that have so far escaped justice.
Grandmother looked at me with a contempt that I had never before seen on her face. “If you understood, you would not go. You are already here, Patty. In the promised land of freedom.”
“Grandmother,” I said, in a voice chilled by anger. “I’m surprised that I have to remind you of what nobody will ever have to remind me: It wasn’t one of your old countries that took away my freedom.”
6
WITH A TONGUE-DAMPENED index finger, I pressed my eye
lashes back against closed lids. More than once, I had seen Edna Louise do it to a count of one hundred. And you do have to give the devil her due, she really does have curly lashes. She told me that it was an important beauty secret of the movie stars, but I don’t know. Somehow, I just can’t imagine Ginger Rogers, Lana Turner, or Susan Hayward entering this world with an imperfection.
At the forty-seventh count, the door chimes resounded. “Patty darling, he’s here!” said Grandmother, whose sense of expectation equaled my own. “What’s-his-name is here!” she said while poking her head into the guest room.
“Marshall Lubin. I know. I heard the chimes.” I gave myself a long, inspecting look in the full-length mirror. Grandmother was right. The blue taffeta strapless with the open-toed silver slippers had been a good choice, and I probably looked as good, maybe better, than I had ever looked before. Anyway, I hope he won’t be too disappointed.
He was standing, hands in pockets, in the middle of Grandma’s vast living room as though on the verge of concluding a brilliant business deal. Marshall Lubin was short, with a broad never-take-no-for-an-answer countenance and when I said, “Hello, Marshall,” with a well-practiced smile, he handed me the florist’s box that rested beneath his arm.
“Ohh,” I said, after removing the cover. “Camellias are my favorite.”
“They’re gardenias,” he said, making those his first in-person words to me.
“They’re my favorite, too,” I answered quickly, but not too convincingly. “And they smell a whole lot better.”
The Ridgeway Country Club was located on a wooded spread at the eastern end of Central Avenue. At the door of the ballroom, a fancy professionally painted sign which rested on an easel announced: The Ridgeway Country Club proudly presents the annual collegiate Rhapsody-in-Blue dinner-dance. Sophisticated music by Ron Rainer.
Our first steps inside the ballroom confirmed what I had feared: Everybody looked so damn belonging ... so damn elegant out on the dance floor, and where in the world did they learn those fancy steps?
But God bless Ron Rainer, who granted me a reprieve. Pressing his baton between two outstretched palms, he stepped before the standing microphone to announce that dinner was now being served.
Good. That will give Marshall and me a little more time to talk, maybe he’ll get to like me a little before he finds out that I never learned to dance.
As he pulled out my chair, I said (Lord, forgive me this lie), “I’m seriously considering going to the University of Alabama. Do you like it there in Tuscaloosa?”
Without exactly answering, he said that his fraternity (ZBT) of which he is treasurer “throws the best parties on campus” and that the University’s school of business (of which he is a student—natch!) is “the best in the country.”
As I slowly nodded in a way calculated to make him think that I was trying to accommodate myself to the grandeur of it, I instead began wondering whatever happened to the likes of the Wharton School of Finance or Harvard’s School of Business? Had they (to keep faith with young Mr. Lubin) dissolved into fantasyland?
But for the first time all evening, Marshall became fascinated with me. (Or was his fascination strictly limited to what he was telling me?) He rubbed his hands together in anticipation for a moment before looking me straight in the eye. “Do you know what’s going to be the coming field of the future?”
I was frankly surprised and pleased that he was going to give credit to endeavors other than accounting and I wanted to offer only a well-considered opinion. I thought about aeronautics. More and more people flying farther and faster.
I thought about medical research. And I thought about television. I’ve read that that newly born industry is on the very brink of conquering illiteracy and spreading culture (bravo Leonard Bernstein!) throughout the land.
Television. It ought to be television, but because Marshall Lubin didn’t seem to be the kind of man who could totally endorse a product that couldn’t be weighed, sniffed, or reduced to a formula, I looked elsewhere.
To chemicals. Yes, chemicals! I think I got it. Why, scientists are using drugs to cure cancer and depression. “I think that the coming field of the future,” I said with all the conviction of a person who’s really sure of his or her ground, “is going to be chemicals.”
“Chemicals?” Marshall was clearly taken by surprise. “Why did you say that?”
My God, why do I say anything? And why do I spend my whole life outsmarting myself? “I don’t know. I just thought—”
“Well, in my opinion,” he said, interrupting with all the finesse of the German hordes crossing the Maginot Line, “and in the opinion of people who know, it’s got to be accounting.”
“Accounting, now that I think about it,” I said too quickly to have thought about it. “I think I see your point.”
Marshall’s face became grave. It was obvious that he had something pretty important to tell me. Outside of being convinced that he wasn’t about to propose marriage, I hadn’t a clue as to what it might be.
He pointed a stubby finger toward me as though I were one of his disciples. “Accounting,” he said, pausing long enough to give the word a kind of solitary significance, “accounting is the field of the future. Consider the acknowledged fact that businesses are getting bigger, more complex. The bigger the business, the more they’re going to have to have accountants to protect their corporate structure.”
I hate what you do, Marshall. If only I knew you a little better, I’d probably hate you too. Because you have the colossal arrogance to assume that whatever you do, whatever you think, is the best thing worth doing, the best thing worth thinking. My God, Marshall, you must even give your bowel movements reverent consideration!
Anyway, I may be the world’s greatest authority on what it is you do. (And I’m not talking about your accounting either.) You see, I’ve lived for eighteen years under the same roof with Pearl get-yourself-into-every-equation Bergen. My mother is a lot like you, Marshall, in that she can’t conceive of being a part of any world whose dead-center isn’t directly focused upon her.
This isn’t even mother’s most recent example of making herself so shamelessly significant, but for me it’s a very memorable example. During the winter months, Alice Sheehan who for fifteen years worked part-time in our store took sick and her husband put her in Memphis’s Baptist Hospital where they diagnosed cancer of the liver.
After that my mother would invariably say as she left for one of her weekly excursions into Memphis, “I sure do wish I had time on this trip to visit poor Alice.”
Well, during the first week of April, mother still hadn’t gotten around to visiting her so she sent her a one-pound box of Whitman’s Sampler, and during the second week of April, “poor Alice” died.
And ever since then I’ve seen my mother attempt to share top billing with Alice in her final drama. Not once or twice (but I’m pretty sure three times) I heard my mother talk on about that candy. Telling people in a voice laden with emotion, “I’m just so thrilled that I was able to make poor Alice happy in her lifetime.”
As I took just the perfect blend of vanilla ice cream and fudge sauce on my spoon, I anticipated the pleasure. So far, this had been the best part of the whole evening. I was finally getting something I wanted and I didn’t have to give a thing.
Marshall tapped my shoulder bone. “Want to dance?”
I looked at Marshall’s parfait glass. Only a dishrag could’ve cleaned it better. “Well ...” I said, automatically standing up as he pulled out my chair. “I just hope that I’m not too tipsy from the wine,” knowing somehow that it’s more socially acceptable to be clumsy with drink than it is to be clumsy without.
Ron Rainer was playing a slow number. A fox trot. Thank God. Thank Rainer. Marshall faced me with an almost heroic stoicism before taking my hand. It wasn’t until then that I realized it was wet with perspiration, but my knees were in even worse shape. I think my bones had begun disintegrating under the sheer weight of my
one-hundred-and-eighteen-pound frame.
Yet with all of my suddenly developing symptomatology, I knew there was still one thing that I must never, never do.
So I glued my eyes on Marshall’s slightly oversized left ear, all the time telling myself that God would strike me down—POW!—if I should even once look down at my feet.
Then one, two, and three/four ... We were dancing! One, two, and three/four ... If there was something simplistic about the way that Marshall viewed accounting as world pivoting, there was something equally simplistic in the way he viewed dancing. One, two, and three/four ... But I guess I shouldn’t complain, it does make it that much easier to follow.
It was pretty near one o’clock when Marshall cut his car’s motor in front of my grandparents’ home. There was a light shining outside the front door and with no competing noises to interfere, it sounded as though every grasshopper in East Memphis were in concert.
Marshall dropped his arm around my bare shoulder and lugged me over to press out a damp, fleshy kiss. I felt slightly repelled. Wasn’t I supposed to feel the opposite? Something was wrong with me. He’s a man. I’m a woman. So aren’t I supposed to feel something ... something at least slightly passionate?
My hand yearned to vigorously scrub off his imprint, but instead I reached for the door handle. “Thanks for a lovely evening.”
This time he came down on my lips with such force that I felt my own teeth cut against the inside flesh of my mouth. “I really have to be going along,” I said, tasting blood, but experiencing concern that I was not feeling what Edna Louise and Modern Romances said I should be.
He didn’t seem to hear. With all his strength, he was busily pulling me toward him. I hated that and I hated his breathing which was becoming heavier and more insistent. With my free hand I pressed down on the handle and the door swung open. “Well, Marshall,” I said, dragging myself out. “It sure has been a lovely evening.”