We Never Told Page 6

  “In New Rochelle? All by herself? She’s all alone in that big house of yours?”

  “No, no. Not a bit of it. She’s with the girl.”

  “What girl?”

  “Ruby,” Joan said.

  “The maid?” When we didn’t respond she said, “What does the maid know about taking care of someone? What starts as a cold can turn into pneumonia.”

  “Ruby’s a natural born doctor,” I said.

  “She’s a nurse?”

  “Wifey,” said Uncle Donald. “Leave it alone.”

  “I’m worried, all alone in that house. What if she falls down? What if she’s burning up from fever?”

  “Wifey,” said Uncle Donald. “Leave it alone.”

  “She’s all right, Harriet,” Seymour said. “Probably just something she ate.”

  “Let’s call her,” Harriet said walking to the old-fashioned telephone. “See how’s she doing.”

  “No, no, no,” said my father. “Not at all. Best let her sleep.” Aunt Harriet gave him a questioning look and went back into the kitchen.

  There was a commotion in the hall, the door opened and there was Uncle Norman still in his tan cardigan, his wife Maggie, and their three children, Eddy, Claire, and Avery. Eddy, the same age as Joan, wore a Red Sox cap and Red Sox jacket. He knew the batting averages of every player even those who played at Fenway Park before he was born. A prisoner in Hebrew school four afternoons a week, his mouth was never fully closed. His lower lip hung down so he looked stupid but he was, in fact, an honor roll seventh grade student. I could not understand why Joan liked him.

  Both his sisters were dressed in clothes that had once belonged to Joan and me. The younger one had to wear thrice-worn dresses because I got Joan’s hand-me-down, then Claire got my hand-me-down, then Avery got the dress and by then the puffy sleeves were too tired to puff. Claire, age nine, had blond Shirley Temple ringlets but no animation in her face. She was beautiful but faded, as if her personality had been bleached right out of her. It embarrassed me to see my cousins in those used clothes. It could easily have been the other way around, me in their used up clothes. I didn’t want sadness thrust in my face like this. I was disturbed by my cousin’s poverty and wanted it to stop, as if someone was holding a flashlight into my eyes.

  Aunt Maggie, a cigarette dangling from her lips, was yellowish and skinny, a capable woman who managed the furniture store as best she could, dealt with wholesalers and customers and a husband who stayed for hours in the bathroom doing crossword puzzles. Grandma Adler yelled from the kitchen, “Eddy come take out the gahbidge!” Eddy headed toward the kitchen with no resistance. Aunt Maggie yelled, “He’s coming, Ma.” Aunt Maggie lit a fresh cigarette from the butt she was holding then said to me as she ground out the stump in an ashtray, “Where’s Violet?”

  “Not feeling well,” said Uncle Donald. “Decided it was best to remain at home.”

  “She didn’t come?”

  “Decided it was best,” said Uncle Donald.

  “Rats,” said Aunt Maggie. “I wanted her to help me with that cable stitch.” She went into the kitchen where we heard her voice mix with Aunt Harriet’s and Grandma’s. At these moments, when I heard my two aunts and my grandmother chatting amid the clatter of dishes, heard an occasional burst of laughter, I wondered if my mother was correct in feeling so superior to them. They were having fun together preparing dinner. My mother never helped Grandma Adler or laughed at anything my aunts said. I wondered if she misled me, had failed to see what was good about the Adlers and now here I was blind to it too.

  “Wanna hear me sing a song?” said Avery. She was six, had a front tooth missing. Her sash was tied in back like an old piece of string. She stood up on one of the chairs and burst forth with, “How Much is that Doggie in the Window.”

  From the kitchen, Maggie yelled, “Avery! Put a sock in it!”

  “I’m singing, Ma!” But she stopped and climbed down from the chair.

  Aunt Maggie yelled from the kitchen, “Girls? Ya want some tawnick?” Tonic was the word for soda.

  “I do!” said Avery and ran into the kitchen. I heard Aunt Maggie say, “It’ll ruin your suppa.” There was the sound of pots and pans, and then Grandma said something that made the other two women burst out laughing, Harriet in a delighted squeal and Maggie with the mirthless tat tat tat of a machine gun.

  Eddy returned from taking out the garbage, gestured to Joan and me with a deck of cards, then sat down cross-legged on the braided rug and began to deal out Crazy Eights.

  “I wanna play,” Avery said. “Eddy, I wanna play.”

  “Get lost, pea brain.”

  “Ma!” Avery stamped her food. “Ma! Eddy won’t let me play cahds with the girls!” No one in Woodbridge ever referred to me by name. Joan and I were a unit, the girls.

  Aunt Maggie called from the kitchen, “Knock it off, Avery. Maybe the girls will play with you later.”

  Meanwhile, standing against the wall and saying only with her expression that she would like to play too, was Claire who gave the organdy dress that I used to wear an ethereal look, as if she were the ghost of a little girl. “Come over here, Claire, dear,” said Uncle Donald. “Come sit near me.” Claire crossed the room and sat at Uncle Donald’s feet but said nothing. Eddy, I knew, would not let her play cards. He always wanted Joan and me to himself. This, perhaps, came from his having no friends. If he did have friends, I never saw them. In Chicago, I knew my cousins’ friends, energetic and intelligent boys who were fun to be with. Wiley’s house was always full of boys filling the place up with their masculine laughter and showing me how much they could lift with heavy weights.

  I tore the picture I’d drawn out of my sketchbook and carried it to Claire. “Would you like to have this, Claire?” The girl looked up from her seat on the floor, took the page, and held it to her chest. She held it there too intensely with her eyes closed as if carried away by a beautiful piece of music. Then Claire opened her eyes. They were pale blue with an unsettling opaqueness behind them. She smiled weakly at me. I went back to the game of Crazy Eights but did not sit down. “I don’t want to play with you,” I said to Eddy. “You hit too hard.” As if he hadn’t heard me, he dealt out the cards and I sat down cross-legged on the rug. Every game over the years began with my complaint and included his hitting too hard. On the other hand, I loved playing cards and sometimes won.

  The winner of Crazy Eights got to smack the losers’ knuckles with the closed deck. The number of points left in the hand was the number of smacks the loser had to endure. Made no sense to really hurt each other. It was just a dumb game that we played sitting on the braided rug in Grandma’s old-fashioned room because there was nothing else to do. When Eddy won, as he did this time, I made a soft fist and held it toward him. “Make a better fist,” he said.

  “No. You hit too hard.”

  “Make a fist. Go on. You lost. Make a fist. That’s the rules.” So I did and tried not to pull back or cry while he smacked my knuckles with maniacal glee until they turned red. All the fury he felt at being stymied by adults and all the nastiness that was part of his character were unleashed on my extended hand. I won the next game and paid him back, both delighting in seeing him wince and disliking seeing him wince. I didn’t want to be doing this. He wasn’t the sort of boy I wanted to be with. I had to be with him. He was in my family. Cousin Avery in the kitchen said, “Grandma, did you make chocolate pudding?” The reply was, “Listen to her. Why wouldn’t I make chocolate pudding?”

  When it was time for dinner, everyone went into the kitchen where the table was set with plates that didn’t match and former jelly jars for glasses. There were two candlesticks at the head of the table. When everyone was seated, Grandma pulled a shawl over her head, struck a match, lit the candles, waved her hands over the flames in a circular motion and said the Sabbath prayer in Hebrew. Everyone, except Joan and me, said it along with her. We never lit Sabbath candles at home. It was only here that I realized my fat
her knew the words of the prayers, and I got glimpse of how different his childhood must have been from mine. He was the child of a religious mother, which meant his boyhood had been full of constraints.

  My other grandmother lit candles on Friday night, too, but she did it by herself in the corner of the kitchen with her back turned to anyone who might walk by. As if performing a secret ceremony, she struck a match and held it to each wick and whispered the prayers in English. “Blessed art thou oh Lord our God, King of the universe who has commanded us to kindle the Sabbath lights.” Unaware that I was watching, she turned from the candles with a soft abruptness as if saying to some internal judge, duty done.

  In Woodbridge, Grandma Adler intoned, “Barukh atah Adonai, Eloheinu, melekh ha’olam … ” She and her family did not homogenize the Hebrew but spoke it with a guttural throat clearing. They said the prayers enthusiastically while my father just mouthed the words with his eyes lowered. Was he as embarrassed as I was by their unabashed Jewishness? How could that be? He was brought up with them. Here was everything Grandma Greenstone was trying to assimilate out of. Except for forbidding Violet to buy a Christmas tree like her brother and sister in Chicago, Seymour did nothing Jewish in New Rochelle. When Passover time came, he drove to Woodbridge and celebrated with his mother. Now, like the other men at the table, he had a yarmulke on his head and a prayer shawl around his shoulders and looked bizarre to me.

  Instead of wine for the adults there was seltzer. The children had to drink soda, not milk. The butter was margarine. “No one makes a roast chicken like Ma,” said Uncle Donald. Aunt Maggie made a joke about the carrot stew, “Ma, this tsimis looks good enough to eat.”

  The next day, Saturday, Joan pulled the chain on the light in the hall and Grandma Adler screamed, “What? Are you crazy? Turning on the light?” Joan forgot the Sabbath rule—no electricity. Grandma let the stove go cold. She was not allowed to ride in a car so she and Seymour walked to Temple but it wasn’t called temple in Woodbridge. It was Shul. My father did not insist that Joan and I stay for the service. It was chanted entirely in Hebrew. We wouldn’t understand a word. But he did insist that we accompany him to the building, go inside, and say hello to the people who greeted us. It looked to me as if there was almost no one there compared to the large congregation of reform Jews at Temple Israel in New Rochelle where Joan and I went to Sunday school, an education that was not reinforced at home.

  Grandma Adler was one of the founders of the synagogue. When she first arrived in Woodbridge, she couldn’t find ten Jewish men to form a minion. There could be no official Jewish service without ten, and there weren’t ten Jews living in or near Woodbridge. I wondered how she managed to stay so observant in a place with no kosher butchers. It must have been a shock to find herself in a town where there were no Jews after being surrounded by Jews in her tenement on the Lower East Side. I wished I could ask her, but I knew she’d only answer with a shrug, say something like, “Listen to her.” I couldn’t ask my father either. His childhood seemed a forbidden topic so I imagined it was horrible, but this didn’t square with the fact that he always wanted to visit Woodbridge and was attentive to all the members of his family, so it probably wasn’t horrible. I suspected he saw Woodbridge as it used to be before the Great Depression, when the mills were going full speed, producing carpets that were sold all over the world, and the stores were full of customers and the sidewalks full of neighbors and the outskirts were farms not housing developments.

  At the synagogue, people came to shake his hand, admire his daughters, and ask him for gossip about Hollywood celebrities. Some of the people were shy, star-struck. Some of the older people remembered when Seymour, in his early twenties, arrived in town with his latest girlfriend, an actress named Lucille LeSeur, who would one day turn into Joan Crawford. I heard about Joan Crawford’s visit every time I went to Woodbridge. They never got over it. The story made me uneasy because it was about my father and sex. Inside the synagogue, Grandma Adler was treated with deference, guided gently to her seat at the front of the women’s section.

  The next day was the big outing to the Wauchusett Dam. I thought if I had to visit that stupid dam one more time I’d die of boredom. It was a massive long wall of gray stone with a promenade on top and water on one side. I had to pretend it was a thrill to walk across the top of that wall and look down on the reservoir.

  Usually Aunt Maggie took Eddy, Claire, and Avery in her car and Seymour took Joan and me in the Cadillac, but this time Seymour suggested that we switch. He hadn’t yet had an opportunity to talk with Eddy. He worried that his nephew would grow up and not know how to make use of the wide world because he wouldn’t even know there was a wide world. Eddy, but never his sisters, stayed with us now and then in New Rochelle so that Seymour could devote himself to educating his nephew. He took him to Times Square to see the thousands of blinking lights and to the Empire State Building. He sat center orchestra with the boy and brought him backstage to meet the actors on Broadway. My mother told me that my father was disappointed when I came out a girl. I was sorry to have disappointed him. What hurt was that my mother told me this. She liked hurting my feelings, apparently. From my point of view, if Seymour wanted Eddy instead of me, he was welcome to him.

  When Eddy visited us, he slept in my father’s bedroom and my father slept on the other side of the house in the guest room. The first time Eddy visited, Joan and I heard a buzz as if a June bug was in the room. Joan was terrified of bugs, especially those because they were the size of a finger and encased as if in plastic. “Mommy!” she shouted out in the dark. “Mommy! There’s a bug in my room!” Mother came from her bedroom wearing her bathrobe, flicked on the lights and hunted for the bug. “Find it,” Joan begged. “You have to find it, Mommy.” But after a few minutes’ search Mother paused and went into the hall. She stood close to Eddy’s door then returned to Joan’s room where Joan was hiding under her covers. “It’s not a bug,” Mother whispered. “It’s Eddy. He’s humming.”

  “There’s no bug?”

  “No. It’s Eddy.”

  “Why’s he humming?”

  “He’s frightened.”

  “Of what?”

  “I don’t know. Could be anything, bless his heart.”

  In Woodbridge, Joan and I climbed into Aunt Maggie’s old Plymouth. The Plymouth reeked of cigarette smoke. The ashtray was overflowing. It was a sunny day, the leaves still new on the trees, daffodils up at the side of the road, forsythia in bloom, and Magnolia trees already dropping their flowers. “My granddad died working on this dam,” Maggie said as we came within sight of the landscaped park that edged the dam.

  “How?”

  “diphtheria.”

  “How’d he get diphtheria?”

  “Everyone got it. No sanitation.” Aunt Maggie pushed in the lighter on her dashboard, flicked her cigarette butt out the window, then lit her fresh cigarette when the car lighter popped out. “The laborers lived in sod huts. They had no floors, just dirt. When it rained or snowed, they lived in mud. Six, eight, ten people in one shack. My granny told me she couldn’t even understand what the people living next to her were saying. She spoke Italian, they spoke German, the ones next to them spoke Polish. My granddad was a stonemason. Every block of granite in that dam was set in by hand. Italian stonemasons are the best in the world.”

  This was the first time that Joan and I had ever been alone with Aunt Maggie. Usually, she was surrounded by her children or else she was at the store. I was both happy to be alone with her and uncomfortable because I didn’t really know her.

  “How come you always make us look at the Wauchusett dam?” I said from the back seat.

  “Me? It’s not my idea. It’s your father.”

  “Why does he do it?”

  “I don’t know. What does he say?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Well, if it was me guessing, it’s because he wants to show you his past.” She slowed the car to a stop, let a woman walking a dog cros
s the street, then drove on. “Do you girls know anything about your Seymour?”

  “His father,” Joan said, “used to sell dry goods from a horse and wagon.”

  “I don’t even know what dry goods is,” I said. Next to me on the worn back seat was Eddy’s Boy Scout sash with merit badges sewn on.

  “Pots and pans,” Aunt Maggie said. “Dish towels. Rolling pins. Stuff like that. Pa Adler sold those things to the people working on the dam. All immigrants. This is the largest hand-dug dam in the world. It was all done with pick axes and mules and pulleys. No bulldozers, no excavators, no cranes. Just men and shovels.”

  “But why do we always have to come look at it?” I said.

  “Maybe because he wants to show you the reason he grew up in Woodbridge.”

  I turned to look at the car behind us, my father at the wheel, Eddy riding shot gun, and Avery’s arm sticking out the back-seat window feeling the air push against it. “Pa Adler came here when the dam was being constructed. It was just a huge hole in the ground.”

  “But why?”

  “The way I hear it,” Aunt Maggie said, “Pa Adler needed the work, so he brought Ma and your father up here. Must not have been any work in New York. The company building the dam found them housing. That house was built for workers. I remember that house from when I was a kid. Used to be a Polish family on the second floor and a German family on the third. Ma Adler told me she was so lonely, she thought she’d die. She had so many Jewish girlfriends in New York. You should ask her sometime about Delancey Street. She told me there were pushcarts full of fish and acrobats with their hats turned over hoping for coins, and mattresses airing out on the fire escapes. She said she used to stand at the window with her baby in her arms just looking out at all the excitement going on. She doesn’t talk about it any more but she used to. She said the nights were the hardest part because it was so dark. She was used to thousands of lights at thousands of windows and music coming out of windows. She said when she first got here and the train used to roar past without stopping she’d cry.”