We Never Told Read online

  “Built the whole thing from scratch,” said Grandpa. “Now we have plants in India, Belgium, Japan. Them Japanese fellas, they don’t shake hands. Darndest thing you ever saw … aw, what’s the matter honey? Go on. Go on. Tell your story.”

  “Never mind.”

  “Daddy,” from Dovey Lee, “let her finish. You’re always interrupting Mama.”

  “Go on, go on, honey. Go on.”

  “Never mind.”

  “Finish the story, Mama.”

  “You bow to them fellas,” Grandpa said. “They got this whole system of bowing. Depends on your status how low you bow down. Now the Chinese, they don’t do business that way. But you got to be careful with a Chinaman. When I started, I didn’t have nothing. I built it up. Wasn’t easy. Last year, we did twelve million dollars in the western states alone and that’s not counting California and it ain’t counting western Canada neither. Opening a new plant in Vancouver. They got a favorable exchange rate up there. Makes sense to do business with them. They don’t all speak French you know. Some of them ain’t French at all.”

  “Daddy!” said Dovey Lee, “You interrupted Mama. She was telling a story.”

  “Go on, honey, go on,” he said looking across the table in a contrite way.

  “Never mind.”

  “Nah. Go on, honey. I’m sorry. Go on. Tell your story”

  “Never mind.”

  “Mama!” said Dovey Lee. “Tell your story. Daddy, be quiet.”

  Grandma pinched her lips together, wouldn’t even say never mind anymore.

  “Going to open a plant in India come March. We got plants in Italy, Greece, Hong Kong. Tell you how I started. We lived in cattle country. Them dairy farmers threw out the whey. I says to myself that whey must be chock full of vitamins. I had it analyzed. Full of vitamins. So I says to myself, what happens if you put them vitamins in animal feed? Why not collect what the dairy farmers discard, reduce it in a laboratory, and mix it in with feed. Most of them livestock fellas called me the vitamin nut. How I’m smart? I surround myself with smart people. Chemists. We got the best chemists you can buy. Cattle and chickens fed with Greenstone Mix are healthy as heck. I got people working for me all over the world. Can’t even speak the same language as most of them. Hire translators. Aw, honey. Don’t be mad. Go on, you finish your story.” He took a cigar from his breast pocket, lit it, and sat back in his chair, a pasha.

  Grandma picked up her ceramic bell and tinkled it. No use begging her to continue. Her lips were pinched shut as if she was determined to be silent for the rest of her life. Willa and Jordan came in from the kitchen and cleared the dishes.

  “Delicious as usual, Willa,” said Uncle Jack tilting back on his chair. Mortified at being noticed, Willa hurried back to the kitchen.

  “Yes, Willa, it was delicious!” everyone said.

  “I got a little something here,” said Grandpa.

  “Is it money, Grandpa?” asked Wiley.

  “Wahl now, you’re going to have to come see for yourself.”

  “Now? Should I come up now?”

  “Wahl now,” Grandpa said, “Now, less see. Let’s do youngest first. Dolly, bring that baby up here.”

  Dolly looked in the portable cradle. “She’s sleeping, Dad.”

  “Wahl then you just come on up here yourself.” Grandpa presented her with an envelope. “Now that there’s for the baby. You put that in the baby’s bank account.” Dolly took the envelope and hugged him.

  “Now, less see. Who’s next? Chuckie. Come on up here and give your grandpa a big kiss. Come on. Atta boy. You come right on up here and give your grandpa a big kiss.” Chuckie toddled up to him, put the envelope in his mouth to taste it, reached his arms up so Grandpa could lift him to his lap. Grandpa said, “What a big boy. What a big boy.” As each child went forward, my heart pounded harder with excitement and stage fright. My turn. I didn’t want to go back to my chair without thanking him. So I took a peek at the bills inside the envelope he handed me and flung my arms around his tummy. No one ever gave me money for no reason to do with as I wished. Grandpa’s generosity was unsettling because it threw into contrast my own father’s parsimony. Was this a difference in attitude or a difference in bank accounts? “Thanks, Grandpa!” I hugged him so intensely that he patted my back and whispered, “That’s awright, honey, that’s awright.”

  Joan’s turn. She hated being in the spotlight. She did not want everyone watching her nor did she want to kiss Grandpa nor did she like this ritual, what she called this beggar’s parade. “Your turn, Joanie,” said cousin Mike who wanted her to finish because it would be his turn next. She pushed her chair back and walked slowly to Grandpa who said, “What’s the matter, honey? You come up here and give your Grandpa a big kiss.” She took the envelope and said, “Thank you, Grandpa,” in her insincere sing song, pecked his cheek, then carried her envelope back to the table and sat there with her mouth twisted way over to the side nibbling the inside of her cheek.

  “Now, less see,” Grandpa said lifting jewelry boxes from the carpet next to his chair. “This here’s Violet’s. Commere, honey.” My mother took the oblong box from her father, kissed him on the lips with a fast peck, and went back to her seat where she opened the box. I saw pearls nestled on peacock blue silk.

  “They are perfectly matched and graduated,” Grandma said. “You must care for them properly. Never store them without wrapping them first in a soft cloth. Never let them scrape against any other jewelry in your jewelry box. Never, and this is most important, put them in water. Pearls need to be worn to glow. Do not save them for special occasions. After dinner I will show you the proper way to care for them.”

  “Yes, Mama.”

  “Dovey Lee, come up here, see what I have for you.” When Dovey Lee sat down she held the pearls up to her neck then turned to her husband Jack for help with the clasp.

  When Grandpa handed Dolly the same oblong box he’d given my mother, I saw Mother frown as if she couldn’t stand the thought that her sister-in-law merited the same gift. Mother had withdrawn into herself and for the rest of the evening, while we children played and the other adults talked, she was a brooding presence.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Joan and I overheard that there had to be “grounds” and in this case there were none. Seymour had to “grant” Violet a divorce and he would not. It was as if the trees were swaying, the air was chilled, the sky was dark, but there was a chance the storm might miss us.

  Though we were living in a threatening atmosphere, I still practiced violin accompanied on our piano three times a week by Eliot, a delicate, musical teenager hired for that purpose. I still worked on my novel, was up to the part when Tippy Adams’ boyfriend drives up to the front door in his jalopy and honks the horn and she runs down the front path to leap into his convertible. Joan still painted and made elaborate designs using colored pencils; our friends came over and we called up boys we liked and hung up the minute they answered. Mother still drove us to our lessons and orthodontist appointments, still tended to her seeds germinating in cold frames, still knelt with spade in hand putting in the yearly annuals. Seymour still went to work after eating corn flakes in the morning while reading the Herald Tribune, still stood before the full-length mirror on the back of his bedroom door practicing card tricks and rehearsing patter. Ruby still went to church every Sunday, sat eating a solitary lunch at the kitchen table while looking out the window at the golf course in the distance, and served us dinner most nights in the dining room.

  One evening, while we were in the dining room, the doorbell rang. The food was hot on our plates. “Who could that be?” my father said. Dressed in his maroon velvet dinner jacket and paisley ascot, he got up from the table, opened the front door, stood there for a moment as if listening to someone on the front porch, and then closed the door. He was a nervous, fidgety person, and I’d never seen him stand so still. I heard a car door slam shut, then heard a car drive away. “Daddy! Who was it?” He turned and looked
at his wife as she sat at the table in her long skirt and silk blouse. He seemed horrified as if someone had just thrown mucous at him. His lips were parted, his eyes were terrible to see. “Daddy! What happened?” He said nothing. He just turned and walked across the living room and went up the stairs, and we could hear his bedroom door shut. “Mommy? What happened?”

  “It was a subpoena.”

  “What?”

  “He got served a subpoena.”

  “What?”

  She looked frightened and guilty. “It just means he has to appear in court.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. That’s how it’s done.”

  “How what’s done?”

  “Just eat your dinner, please. Just eat your dinner.”

  Just as I would never go to him for consolation so did I know not to try to share his unhappiness. I did not seek him out after dessert.

  At spring vacation, my mother refused to visit her husband’s family. She despised his family, only went with him to Woodbridge out of wifely obligation. “What am I supposed to say to them?” I heard him ask.

  “I don’t care. Say whatever you want.” Even when she did go with us, Mother showed her distaste for her in-laws by staying upstairs in one of the bedrooms. I would find her dressed in her cashmere sweater and slacks, laying on her back on the sagging bed staring at the bare bulb that dangled from the ceiling, the voices of her in-laws coming up through the grate in the floor.

  I didn’t want to go to Woodbridge either. “Other kids go to Florida on spring vacation.”

  “Aw, quit your bellyaching.”

  Seymour sat behind the wheel, started the ignition, sang out cheerfully, “We’re off!” He was greeted with sullen silence by his daughters. He backed the car out of the driveway by opening the door and looking out rather than by turning his head to see behind. He bumped into the hedges, pulled forward and tried again. My mother was an excellent driver, had been driving since the age of eleven when she drove herself to school in Texas. My father’s lack of skill, I thought, came from his being old. Since I didn’t know when cars were invented, I thought he wasn’t good at working them because they weren’t around during his youth. After bumping into the hedges, he backed out onto the street and came to a full stop before turning the wheel not hand over hand as my mother did, but by feeding the wheel from his left hand into his right. At North Avenue, he braked for the red light but got lost in thought so Joan said, “Daddy. It’s green. You can go.”

  “Aw, hold your horses.”

  In Connecticut, we drove past tobacco farms where acres of gauze covered the plants. Sometimes we stopped to explore old cemeteries, the gravestones listing and fuzzy with moss. Some were works of art, angels weeping with long hair, skulls with wide eyes. Seymour made up a contest and gave a quarter to whoever could find the oldest gravestone. Sometimes we had to brush back overgrown weeds to read the stone’s inscription. It was fun and eerie too. In Massachusetts, we drove through towns with quaint town centers, a white church with a spire, an inn dating from the days of the American Revolution.

  We visited general stores that sold peanuts in barrels, wheels of cheese, penny candy in jars, pickles in barrels, hunting vests and fishing boots. I thought the proprietor, dressed in his white apron, didn’t know that now people could buy candy bars wrapped in foil. I thought his place was so old-fashioned because he lived far away from New York City. He didn’t know people could buy peanuts already out of their shells. My father always engaged the proprietor in conversation, seemed to crave hearing a New England accent. “They have no pretentions,” he said. “They’re real.” His conversation with the general store proprietor always led to a magic trick, Seymour taking a coin out of the man’s ear or elbow. Then out came a deck of cards, my father fanning them in front of the proprietor and saying, “Take a look at this. Pick a card, any card. Don’t show it to me.” Then continuing the patter until the proprietor exclaimed, “Hey! How’d you do that?” It embarrassed me to see my father trying to be liked by the general store proprietor. Maybe he was telling himself that he could make friends with anyone. But this wasn’t true.

  What seemed true to me was that he wasn’t good at talking to people or listening to them and had to resort to card tricks to make encounters possible. Joan and I went out to wait in the car. And wait. We sat inside the car, we got out, we paced, we snapped on the radio, we changed stations, we played with whatever dog wandered by. We were in the middle of nowhere, no stores next door, nothing but the road and in the distance a red barn and pasture. Then I couldn’t stand it a second longer. I flounced into the store, stood glaring at him and said, “Daddy! Come! On!” He sent me a withering look. But he did come out. I was riding shot gun now and could feel his annoyance vibrating in my direction. I’d done him an injustice, from his point of view. This had happened before. It happened on every trip to Woodbridge. In the car, he said nothing and I said nothing. Maybe his stomach was in a knot, too. Joan and I pinched open peanuts and threw the shells out the window.

  We arrived in Woodbridge through a canyon of red brick and my whole self seized up. I hated it here. It was as if the minute I saw those abandoned red brick mills on both sides of the road, windows bandaged with plywood, For Sale signs on their roofs, the seedy downtown with its Strand movie theater that showed films I never heard of, and the dress shop with a mannequin missing her arm, my very soul hid. My father, on the other hand, perked up. He loved Woodbridge.

  He burst into song but not with words. He hissed a tune through his front teeth. It sounded like steam escaping. All that came out was the rhythm of the song. I knew which song he was hissing because he played them on our piano at home while I sang them. I felt an intimate connection with my father while he sat at the piano and I sang “Shine on Harvest Moon”, “Bicycle Built for Two”, and “All I do is Dream of You”. He was hissing “By the Light of the Silvery Moon” when he turned onto the gravel driveway of a three-story wooden house next to a brick mill that was dark at the windows. “Dahlinks,” I said mocking his mother, “come in. You must be starved.” Seymour sent me a scolding look.

  My haughtiness in Woodbridge cascaded upon everything, starting with the sparrows. Why feed such riff raff? I expressed my distaste for my father’s side of the family by kicking pebbles at the birds. They flew up, a cluster of brown, then came down again, turned their backs on me, and continued pecking in another part of the driveway.

  Chipped cement stairs led to a screened porch. The screen was so coated with soot it was hardly transparent any more, blocked the view of the mill next door like a black curtain. There were three chairs on the porch, two straight back with caned seats and one a bentwood rocker that I knew was a wedding gift to Grandma Adler when she married at age fifteen. I knew that she carried that chair with her on the boat from Austria to Ellis Island. Graceful in its rounded edges, the chair lived with her and Grandpa Adler in a tenement on the Lower East Side of New York where, at age seventeen, she gave birth to my father.

  The doorbell was a bronze crank in the middle of the door. As my father took hold of it he said, “Just say your mother isn’t feeling well.” He wound up the crank, released it and a shrill twinggg! resounded inside. So, he hadn’t told his family. He already had a lawyer named Clement Monroe, but he hadn’t told his family. Did he plan to never tell them? Divorce to him was as shameful as bankruptcy or embezzlement. It was something that Jews just didn’t do.

  Again he twisted the crank and released it. Twing! “Maybe she’s not home,” from Joan. “Let me do it,” I said and twisted the crank but my hands were too small to wind it tight so the sound was a feeble, twink. “She’s probably in the kitchen,” my father said. There was a window in the upper half of the door shaded by a lace curtain. He rapped. “Ma?” No answer. “Ma?” If there was one name that was forbidden in my mother’s rules of assimilation it was Ma. The very sound of it made her shudder. To torment her, Joan and I sometimes called her Ma. She fell into the trap
every time, got furious and said, “Don’t call me Ma!”

  “Let’s go home,” from me.

  “Oh pipe down,” from him.

  The door opened and there was Grandma Adler, short and wide at the waist, with an apron tied around her house dress, prison matron shoes, and tightly curled gray hair. “Dahlinks, come in, you must be starved.”

  I prayed some miracle would happen so I could get past her into the front parlor but I couldn’t. She let me know how happy she was to see me by pinching my cheek. It was a nasty pinch that ended with a twist. I backed away from her and stood waiting for the pain to ebb with my palm over the sting. That was her greeting, every visit, and it made me understand, through my fury at being hurt for no reason, that Grandma Adler had endured a rough life. My father was probably not the recipient of much tenderness in his childhood. He did not go toward his mother but stood holding the suitcases as he said in a cheerful way, “Hello, Ma, how are you?

  “How am I? How should I be? My beck. My beck is killing me.” Grandma Adler touched the small of her back then said, “So where’s your wife? Tell her to come in already.”

  “She couldn’t come, Ma. She’s come down with something. Is that chicken soup I smell? No one makes chicken soup like you, Ma.”

  “Oy yoy yoy,” Grandma said, slapping her cheek and looking in a suspicious way at her son, “if it ain’t one thing it’s another. Come in, come in, you’ll eat.”

  “No thank you, Grandma,” Joan said. “We’re not hungry. We just ate.” This was true. We were full of peanuts.