Lucky Us, page 16
“And a bath,” Danny said. “Reenie gave me the longest bath ever. I never had a bath like that.”
“That’s right. He had a very long bath and he was amazingly clean and when the steam cleared, he looked at Reenie and she looked at him, and I know she felt that she had found the amazing little boy she was looking for.”
Danny turned his face toward the cushion. I put my hand on his back.
“Come on, hero,” I said. “Maybe that’s it for tonight.”
We put our arms around each other and I tucked him in.
“It’s a good story,” he said. “But kinda sad.”
WE TOLD EACH OTHER the story every night for weeks, and we managed to get in some unkind remarks about Iris’s disappearance and a few jokes about the rabbi at Edgar’s funeral. I said that Edgar had saved Danny’s life during the fire and we both liked that. We didn’t dwell on the fire but Danny told me he could see the smoke, even from Edgar’s window, and I knew that meant that he had heard the sounds as well. We told the story of our move from the Torellis’ and the happy landing on the shores of Old Tree Lane. (So long, Torellis! Hello, Old Tree Lane and crazy Mr. Mason across the street, with the overalls and no underwear!)
I made myself drive back to the Pride of Israel orphanage to find Danny’s brother, the awful and adorable Bobby, but I failed. Narrow mattresses were stacked on the lawn. Window screens were propped against the railings. I walked across the playground and through the front door, propped open with a rock. They had found a permanent home for every American child, the social worker said. The end of the war was a good time for that. They were closing their doors at the end of the month. I saw boxes and crates and bed frames behind her. I was glad to go home and go on with the story of Amazing Danny, whose original last name was lost to him, and to me.
24
Prisoner of Love
RUTHIE POST USED TO TELL DANNY THAT THE HOUSE OF THE Lord had gold plates and sparkling fountains and beautiful fruit piled on silver platters. Dorothy Berman’s house was just like that.
“Pure gold basins. Wicker trimmers. Gold spoons and hinges of gold, for all the doors and inside and outside. Everywhere. That’s what it says in the Bible. Kings seven fifty.” Ruthie whispered to Danny while an old lady in a gray dress with a white lacy apron led them to Dorothy’s room. “Everywhere.”
They didn’t even like Dorothy. No one liked Dorothy. Ruthie’s brother told them that in junior high, some people got made fun of and sometimes it was really bad. But in fifth grade, most everyone was in a big pool, moving from year to year. Dorothy Berman stuck out already, and she liked Ruthie and she liked Danny.
Dorothy took them downstairs to the finished basement, set up like a soda shop, with a counter and spinning stools and big pink neon sign that said BERMAN’S. Dorothy leaned against the soda fountain, like it was a baby grand piano. She stretched out an arm, bent her elbow, and rested her brown curly hair on her hand, looking right at Danny. She sang, “Don’t know why there’s no sun up in the sky, stormy weather …” She showed her dimples.
It was worse than embarrassing. It was scary.
Dorothy pulled Coca-Cola bottles out of a red chest and they all drank their sodas, silently. Danny thought the visit seemed so likely to go bad. The gold hinges. The frosty bottles of Coca-Cola. The privacy. In Ruthie’s house, which was more like a normal house, there was always a mother or an aunt swinging by purposefully to see that there was no nonsense and no scuffing of the floor and no eating of things meant for dinner. It was like the Berman house was empty.
Dorothy cleared her throat and went back to the soda fountain. She indicated with her chin and Ruthie and Danny sat down at their bistro table, with the red-and-white leather seats. Dorothy put her hand to her heart.
“Good morning, heartache, what’s new?… I’ve got those Monday blues, straight through Sunday blues …,” she sang. “Sit down.”
It was worse than before. It was beautiful and breathtaking, the kind of performance Clara Williams talked about sometimes. It was giving voice to the heartache of being Dorothy Berman, which Danny thought was a lot. Dorothy was the apple of no one’s eye. Her mother drove her to school every day in a clean dark-blue Caddy, and dressed her as if she were a fairy-tale princess, in wide pink skirts with a petticoat and party shoes, and it only made her look worse.
Danny leaned toward Ruthie, so they’d be in it together, and Ruthie, who usually pulled away, leaned toward him. Dorothy threw her head back, showing her fat little neck, and the pink neon letters behind the soda fountain lit up the tiny hairs on her jaw and her gold locket and she sang blue and low and slow. She sang like Billie Holiday. Clara said that Billie Holiday woke up crying. Clara said that if you sing the blues, you know that if you can’t make friends with grief, you’ve got to at least make way for it.
Dorothy curtsied and joined them at their table.
“I’m pretty good,” she said, and she was so pleased with herself, Danny felt better. “How about a game?”
Danny and Ruthie knew dodgeball. Ruthie was good at double Dutch and Danny was very good at shooting marbles. He relaxed. He knew how to play games.
“Let’s go over here,” Dorothy said.
“Over here” was the storeroom, beyond the soda fountain (Dorothy called it the lounge). It was stocked with cases of soda, boxes of crackers, tins of sardines, plastic boxes of drink stirrers and frilled toothpicks, little glass jars of curled anchovies.
“Each one of us will go in and then come out and do something … surprising. Danny, you come out and surprise me and Ruthie first.”
Ruthie and Danny looked at each other. Ruthie liked to scare Danny because he was easy to scare, and once she fried his hair flat and steaming with a hot comb and once Danny picked a handful of honeysuckles and stuck the bunch under Ruthie’s nose, which did surprise her. This wasn’t that.
Dorothy turned on the light and pushed Danny in and shut the door. Danny rested his forehead on a case of crackers, sweating, until Dorothy finally opened the door. She looked disappointed. Ruthie looked at Danny and said, “Dorothy, you go. You’re the one who knows how to do this. We’re just guests.” She said “guests” like it was code for idiots and Dorothy smiled and pushed them both out.
Danny and Ruthie sat with their empty Coca-Cola bottles. Dorothy came out in her underpants, with a serious look, holding a big blue box of matches.
Danny put his hand on top of Ruthie’s. Ruthie said, “Thankyouforhavingus.” Danny said, “SeeyouMonday.” They ran past the old lady who had let them in and past the little black dogs with the bows on their heads, past the gold clocks in the front hall and the gold faucets in the front hall bathroom, and they walked, very quickly, to the corner.
The corner was no help. The corner was a thick green carpet of lawn and another big house with columns set far back from the lawn. You could see water past the house.
Ruthie said, “I’ll sit over there and you ring the doorbell and you ask can you call home for someone to come get us now.” Ruthie was very careful to say someone and Danny appreciated it. Ruthie didn’t say a thing when his mother died, because it was too terrible to even talk about and when he and his aunt Eva moved from the Torellis’ to Old Tree Lane, just three blocks from Ruthie’s, surrounded by other small houses, with nothing but a picnic table and their rusty tetherball set instead of the Torelli pool, all Ruthie said was, “It’s nice.”
Eva would be at work, telling people’s fortunes. Eva would say, Oh, big guy, is there any way you can take the bus?
Danny said, “You ring the doorbell and call your mother. I’ll sit here.”
They had been secret best friends for a long time. Danny knew that Ruthie would be better at bell-ringing because she had a way about her, but he knew that this was not a neighborhood with Negro girls in it. Danny knew that he should offer to go to the door, because he was white, but he was almost pissing himself already and when the lady of the house asked him why he was standing on her doorstep, he knew he would throw up on her black pumps. They walked back to Dorothy Berman’s house, where Dorothy sat on a stone bench, in the middle of her vast front lawn, fully dressed, her bare feet on a granite tortoise, sipping a Coke.
“You guys,” she said fondly. “Where’d ya go?”
DOROTHY TOOK THEM UPSTAIRS. They trooped past the old lady, who opened and closed her mouth while she slept in the library. Dorothy Berman’s room was the most beautiful thing Danny had ever seen. It gleamed. It shimmered. The silver centers of the embroidered pink daisies on her bedspread shone. She had her own pink velveteen couch, which Ruthie was edging toward, and she had a pink-and-white desk, with a white wood desk chair. The cushion on the chair matched the pink and silver and white pillows on her bed. There were eight pillows for nothing but decoration, two of them shaped like stars.
Danny wanted to sprawl out on the bed. He would take his shoes off and his belt, and then he would stretch his arms under the covers and feel the silk all over him. He would roll off his socks, where the girls couldn’t see him. It was very hard to just stand there and not touch any of the pretty, pointless, expensive things. He wanted to chase Dorothy Berman out of the house and tear through the rooms, ripping and running, and then set it all on fire. Fire trucks would roar up, Dorothy Berman and her stupid dogs would sit on the big front lawn and eight firemen in their black-and-yellow coats would pull out their hoses and there’d be nothing left of the Bermans’ house but black wood and wet grass. It was good luck, Danny thought, that Joey Torelli hadn’t had a room like this. Joey had a nice room, with a carved headboard and curtains with sailboats on them and fancy lights with sailboats painted on them, but he didn’t have anything like this, so Danny had never wanted to kill Joey.
DOROTHY OPENED HER TOY chest. She had Monopoly and Sorry! and Chutes and Ladders. Ruthie said, Let’s play Sorry. Monopoly can take all day, she said.
They played through a game of Chutes and Ladders. “Some people call it ‘Snakes and Ladders,’ ” Dorothy said, and Ruthie and Danny nodded. With another girl, Ruthie might have rolled her eyes and Danny would have shrugged, but the image of cheerful, saucy Dorothy in her blue-sprigged underpants and the big blue box of matches, Dorothy’s smooth white chest, her two chubby little mounds and her rosy nipples, and all of these very disturbing things together rose up in front of him when Dorothy spoke. Danny saw her sailing down a chute, brown curls gleaming in the sun. She climbed the ladder and Danny could see her bottom in her underpants. Dorothy smiled when Ruthie beat her and when Ruthie eyed the four gold lockets lying on Dorothy’s pink dresser, Dorothy put one in Ruthie’s hand. “ ’Til butter flies,” Dorothy said. “I can give you one too,” Dorothy said, and Danny put his hands in his pockets.
WHEN DANNY IS A teenager, and Ruthie has moved hundreds of miles away, he will find himself, with new friends in darkened movie theaters, watching horror movies in which some idiot feels the need to explore the dark, menace-filled basement. The entire movie audience shouts, “Don’t go in the basement!” but Danny never shouts. He grips the armrests and thinks, in the last row of the Playhouse Theater of Great Neck, he thinks, Dorothy Berman.
Letter from Gus
Trutzhain, Germany
April 1947
Dear Evie,
Spring is busting out here. More goddamn babies, more homely girls marrying schlemiels like there’s a white sale at Macy’s. We’re breeding. We got green grass. We got flowers. A small blue flower the little girls go crazy for. They make a game of weaving grass baskets and filling them with the flowers. They leave the baskets on people’s pillows. Not mine, but other people’s.
Hey, there, I’m now Gersh Hoffman, Jewish schoolteacher. Hey, you’ll say, where are the records of your life, Gersh Hoffman? I say I don’t know why no one can find my records. I say I was interned at Stringtown and Camp Forrest. The government people here are a little embarrassed about my deportation, so no one checks too carefully. As everyone here now knows, I’m here “through a shameful miscarriage of justice.” I’m quoting a visiting Brit who was glad to throw a little shit on the Americans. (Meanwhile, the Brits are practically chaining Jews to their bedposts to keep them from going to Palestine.) People want to get me home before another bad thing happens to me. They better fucking hurry.
Your Gus
25
On the Sunny Side of the Street
LUCKY JEWS. GUS THOUGHT THIS EVERY TIME HE STOOD IN THE steam of Stricoff’s bakery waiting for his rye bread, every time he caught a hot doughnut from the cart near the high school, every time he ate brisket at the railroad station luncheonette, watching the bookie in the corner booth go about his business. And lucky Gersh Hoffman, he thought. Just when the school board had decided that since they were going to have all these smart Jewish kids tumbling in, it might be good to have a few Jewish teachers of the right kind (preferably veterans, and truly American, preferably teaching math or Latin, the kinds of subjects troublemakers were not drawn to), Gersh Hoffman showed up, a limping, accentless, hawk-eyed Jewish teacher of math and engineering. Instantly hired at a decent salary after only one quick round with the Loyalty Oath (“I further swear that I do not advise, advocate or teach, and have not within the period beginning five years prior to the effective date of the ordinance requiring the making of this oath, advised, advocated or taught, the overthrowing by force, violence or other unlawful means, of the Government of the United States of America or of the State of New York …”), which he swallowed like cold coffee.
He was happiest in the stores. He shopped almost every day. Just the sight of food made him happy, and he loved the food of Great Neck. Six whole roast chickens, turning on a spit in the front window. Tuna fish decorated with a tomato rose, and a bowl of egg salad with the day of the week spelled out in olive slices. Sandwiches the size of lunch boxes. The German deli was run by a distant cousin of Kaiser Wilhelm and the Great Neck Jews loved the place; they flocked to Kuch’s. They said to one another, What a character he is, Otto, strictly old country, I’m telling you. Gus didn’t think that Negroes would rush to shop in a store run by some retired slave owner, eager to share memories of fun times on the plantation, praising Massa’s old-fashioned Mississippi charm. Jews were still chasing that absurd, wishful feather. Eventually, Jews would become like everybody else. They’d elevate smaller grievances; they’d cherish hurt feelings and ill treatment like they were signs of virtue.
In fifty years, Gus will read about Jewish young men and women writing long essays, even whole books, about their experiences as the grandchildren, or the grandnieces and -nephews, of Holocaust survivors, as if that entitled them to anything, and some of them will choose to tattoo the string of numbers on their forearms, and none of it surprises him.
We tried, he thought, watching the nice families drive to the synagogue, religious but not fanatic, the father parking about a block away, giving the wife a hand getting out of the Olds, then Sylvia, Rachel, and David climbing out and following, like ducklings in blue wool. All of us, the DPs, the soldiers who liberated the camps, even the survivors who came here—we tried to keep it from you. We protected America from what happened, like a man takes care of his wife. The man doesn’t mind when she closes her eyes at the scary part of the ride, of the movie. He loves her for that sweet, willful ignorance. She gives him something to protect, a nice world in which bad things don’t happen. It’s a pleasure, and a relief, to keep that ignorance intact, even as it comes between them.
As much as Gus loved the food and the bustle of Middle Neck Road’s sidewalks (a dozen different pairs of high heels, all staccato, a big-assed drum line), Gus loved the Chase National Bank even more, and he read everything he could about the bank and the Rockefellers; when Chase merged with the Manhattan Company, he followed the purchase like he had skin in the game. The Chase Bank was the archway through which Gus’s new and lucky life was running.
When all the real estate moguls and movie stars and orchestra leaders lost their shirts, their houses, their ridiculous racing yachts, and their unpaid-for Rolls-Royces, the sensible men at Chase foreclosed. George Dodge and Walter Chrysler and their friends moved out of Great Neck or moved on or died. The bank took back their half-timbered Tudors with carriage house, pool house, and pool, their Bauhaus-on-the-Sound, their Nantucket-style seventeen-acre estates with the white gravel circular driveways and Moorish lawn decorations, divided them into three and four and even six lots, and said, Someone’s got to buy them. And the Jews said, Please, let it be us. And the sensible men at Chase, who did not themselves live in Great Neck, said, Fine, we haven’t had a Jew since 1891, when that rich Irishman got a house for his own tailor, to always have him nearby, but, let it be Jews. Eventually, they would let African Americans buy too, but not in the 1950s. (Ralph Bunche, no. Joe Jones, a little later, yes, because every town needs a good taxi service, and eventually, East Asians, yes, with their very smart kids who frankly made the Jewish kids look like slackers, and when the Iranian Jews come in the 1970s, it’s the Ashkenazic version of Katie-bar-the-door, as far as Gus can see, but too late. Gus knew his history; unless you actually kill the people you have let move into your town, there is no getting them out. Their children will mix with your children. Sooner or later, their children will marry your children. Sooner or later, they will be jumping the broom and smashing a lightbulb in the same joyful, fierce move. Their children will be more beautiful than any child ever produced in your otherwise monochromatic family tree.)
The Jews came in, from Brooklyn and Queens. They came to houses near the railroad station and on Baker Hill, with cheap suitcases. They came in on the G.I. Bill, and the lucky veterans, who held the top tickets in the lottery, put their five hundred dollars in cash in an envelope and drove their in-laws’ cars from Flatbush Avenue to Ramsey Road. The Great Neck News carried prim editorials, complaining of dirty-faced city children dashing out of overcrowded moving vans, trailing firecrackers and bad habits from the outer boroughs. (Eventually, the rich men building Long Island Jewish Hospital, with their Jewish partners, told the editors to shut up and confine themselves to writing about the lovely rhododendrons of Kenilworth and the prompt service of the Fire Department, which they did. Five years later, the Great Neck News carried ads for Fein Furniture and the Cohen Brothers’ Steem-Cleaning.) The Jewish veterans moved their pregnant wives into three-bedroom houses, which looked a lot like the three-bedroom houses to the right and left of them. On summer nights, twenty-five noisy Jewish kids—and the occasional Castellano and O’Brien—poured into the wide streets, playing running bases or monkey in the middle or flipping baseball cards until someone’s little brother was left empty-handed and started to cry. They ran from one end of the block to the other, through six narrow backyards, chasing fireflies and one another and hurrying to watch Bobby Feldman throw himself out of the willow tree again. Gus had introduced himself to the two Mrs. Schwartzes, at either end of Ramsey Road, who made iced tea and lemonade and put plastic pitchers on a card table on the front lawn, and he’d met the fathers, accountants and shoe salesmen and furriers, called out “Hey, Koufax,” “Hey, Helen Keller, heads up!” and took turns throwing and catching for the kids until it was too dark.
“That’s right. He had a very long bath and he was amazingly clean and when the steam cleared, he looked at Reenie and she looked at him, and I know she felt that she had found the amazing little boy she was looking for.”
Danny turned his face toward the cushion. I put my hand on his back.
“Come on, hero,” I said. “Maybe that’s it for tonight.”
We put our arms around each other and I tucked him in.
“It’s a good story,” he said. “But kinda sad.”
WE TOLD EACH OTHER the story every night for weeks, and we managed to get in some unkind remarks about Iris’s disappearance and a few jokes about the rabbi at Edgar’s funeral. I said that Edgar had saved Danny’s life during the fire and we both liked that. We didn’t dwell on the fire but Danny told me he could see the smoke, even from Edgar’s window, and I knew that meant that he had heard the sounds as well. We told the story of our move from the Torellis’ and the happy landing on the shores of Old Tree Lane. (So long, Torellis! Hello, Old Tree Lane and crazy Mr. Mason across the street, with the overalls and no underwear!)
I made myself drive back to the Pride of Israel orphanage to find Danny’s brother, the awful and adorable Bobby, but I failed. Narrow mattresses were stacked on the lawn. Window screens were propped against the railings. I walked across the playground and through the front door, propped open with a rock. They had found a permanent home for every American child, the social worker said. The end of the war was a good time for that. They were closing their doors at the end of the month. I saw boxes and crates and bed frames behind her. I was glad to go home and go on with the story of Amazing Danny, whose original last name was lost to him, and to me.
24
Prisoner of Love
RUTHIE POST USED TO TELL DANNY THAT THE HOUSE OF THE Lord had gold plates and sparkling fountains and beautiful fruit piled on silver platters. Dorothy Berman’s house was just like that.
“Pure gold basins. Wicker trimmers. Gold spoons and hinges of gold, for all the doors and inside and outside. Everywhere. That’s what it says in the Bible. Kings seven fifty.” Ruthie whispered to Danny while an old lady in a gray dress with a white lacy apron led them to Dorothy’s room. “Everywhere.”
They didn’t even like Dorothy. No one liked Dorothy. Ruthie’s brother told them that in junior high, some people got made fun of and sometimes it was really bad. But in fifth grade, most everyone was in a big pool, moving from year to year. Dorothy Berman stuck out already, and she liked Ruthie and she liked Danny.
Dorothy took them downstairs to the finished basement, set up like a soda shop, with a counter and spinning stools and big pink neon sign that said BERMAN’S. Dorothy leaned against the soda fountain, like it was a baby grand piano. She stretched out an arm, bent her elbow, and rested her brown curly hair on her hand, looking right at Danny. She sang, “Don’t know why there’s no sun up in the sky, stormy weather …” She showed her dimples.
It was worse than embarrassing. It was scary.
Dorothy pulled Coca-Cola bottles out of a red chest and they all drank their sodas, silently. Danny thought the visit seemed so likely to go bad. The gold hinges. The frosty bottles of Coca-Cola. The privacy. In Ruthie’s house, which was more like a normal house, there was always a mother or an aunt swinging by purposefully to see that there was no nonsense and no scuffing of the floor and no eating of things meant for dinner. It was like the Berman house was empty.
Dorothy cleared her throat and went back to the soda fountain. She indicated with her chin and Ruthie and Danny sat down at their bistro table, with the red-and-white leather seats. Dorothy put her hand to her heart.
“Good morning, heartache, what’s new?… I’ve got those Monday blues, straight through Sunday blues …,” she sang. “Sit down.”
It was worse than before. It was beautiful and breathtaking, the kind of performance Clara Williams talked about sometimes. It was giving voice to the heartache of being Dorothy Berman, which Danny thought was a lot. Dorothy was the apple of no one’s eye. Her mother drove her to school every day in a clean dark-blue Caddy, and dressed her as if she were a fairy-tale princess, in wide pink skirts with a petticoat and party shoes, and it only made her look worse.
Danny leaned toward Ruthie, so they’d be in it together, and Ruthie, who usually pulled away, leaned toward him. Dorothy threw her head back, showing her fat little neck, and the pink neon letters behind the soda fountain lit up the tiny hairs on her jaw and her gold locket and she sang blue and low and slow. She sang like Billie Holiday. Clara said that Billie Holiday woke up crying. Clara said that if you sing the blues, you know that if you can’t make friends with grief, you’ve got to at least make way for it.
Dorothy curtsied and joined them at their table.
“I’m pretty good,” she said, and she was so pleased with herself, Danny felt better. “How about a game?”
Danny and Ruthie knew dodgeball. Ruthie was good at double Dutch and Danny was very good at shooting marbles. He relaxed. He knew how to play games.
“Let’s go over here,” Dorothy said.
“Over here” was the storeroom, beyond the soda fountain (Dorothy called it the lounge). It was stocked with cases of soda, boxes of crackers, tins of sardines, plastic boxes of drink stirrers and frilled toothpicks, little glass jars of curled anchovies.
“Each one of us will go in and then come out and do something … surprising. Danny, you come out and surprise me and Ruthie first.”
Ruthie and Danny looked at each other. Ruthie liked to scare Danny because he was easy to scare, and once she fried his hair flat and steaming with a hot comb and once Danny picked a handful of honeysuckles and stuck the bunch under Ruthie’s nose, which did surprise her. This wasn’t that.
Dorothy turned on the light and pushed Danny in and shut the door. Danny rested his forehead on a case of crackers, sweating, until Dorothy finally opened the door. She looked disappointed. Ruthie looked at Danny and said, “Dorothy, you go. You’re the one who knows how to do this. We’re just guests.” She said “guests” like it was code for idiots and Dorothy smiled and pushed them both out.
Danny and Ruthie sat with their empty Coca-Cola bottles. Dorothy came out in her underpants, with a serious look, holding a big blue box of matches.
Danny put his hand on top of Ruthie’s. Ruthie said, “Thankyouforhavingus.” Danny said, “SeeyouMonday.” They ran past the old lady who had let them in and past the little black dogs with the bows on their heads, past the gold clocks in the front hall and the gold faucets in the front hall bathroom, and they walked, very quickly, to the corner.
The corner was no help. The corner was a thick green carpet of lawn and another big house with columns set far back from the lawn. You could see water past the house.
Ruthie said, “I’ll sit over there and you ring the doorbell and you ask can you call home for someone to come get us now.” Ruthie was very careful to say someone and Danny appreciated it. Ruthie didn’t say a thing when his mother died, because it was too terrible to even talk about and when he and his aunt Eva moved from the Torellis’ to Old Tree Lane, just three blocks from Ruthie’s, surrounded by other small houses, with nothing but a picnic table and their rusty tetherball set instead of the Torelli pool, all Ruthie said was, “It’s nice.”
Eva would be at work, telling people’s fortunes. Eva would say, Oh, big guy, is there any way you can take the bus?
Danny said, “You ring the doorbell and call your mother. I’ll sit here.”
They had been secret best friends for a long time. Danny knew that Ruthie would be better at bell-ringing because she had a way about her, but he knew that this was not a neighborhood with Negro girls in it. Danny knew that he should offer to go to the door, because he was white, but he was almost pissing himself already and when the lady of the house asked him why he was standing on her doorstep, he knew he would throw up on her black pumps. They walked back to Dorothy Berman’s house, where Dorothy sat on a stone bench, in the middle of her vast front lawn, fully dressed, her bare feet on a granite tortoise, sipping a Coke.
“You guys,” she said fondly. “Where’d ya go?”
DOROTHY TOOK THEM UPSTAIRS. They trooped past the old lady, who opened and closed her mouth while she slept in the library. Dorothy Berman’s room was the most beautiful thing Danny had ever seen. It gleamed. It shimmered. The silver centers of the embroidered pink daisies on her bedspread shone. She had her own pink velveteen couch, which Ruthie was edging toward, and she had a pink-and-white desk, with a white wood desk chair. The cushion on the chair matched the pink and silver and white pillows on her bed. There were eight pillows for nothing but decoration, two of them shaped like stars.
Danny wanted to sprawl out on the bed. He would take his shoes off and his belt, and then he would stretch his arms under the covers and feel the silk all over him. He would roll off his socks, where the girls couldn’t see him. It was very hard to just stand there and not touch any of the pretty, pointless, expensive things. He wanted to chase Dorothy Berman out of the house and tear through the rooms, ripping and running, and then set it all on fire. Fire trucks would roar up, Dorothy Berman and her stupid dogs would sit on the big front lawn and eight firemen in their black-and-yellow coats would pull out their hoses and there’d be nothing left of the Bermans’ house but black wood and wet grass. It was good luck, Danny thought, that Joey Torelli hadn’t had a room like this. Joey had a nice room, with a carved headboard and curtains with sailboats on them and fancy lights with sailboats painted on them, but he didn’t have anything like this, so Danny had never wanted to kill Joey.
DOROTHY OPENED HER TOY chest. She had Monopoly and Sorry! and Chutes and Ladders. Ruthie said, Let’s play Sorry. Monopoly can take all day, she said.
They played through a game of Chutes and Ladders. “Some people call it ‘Snakes and Ladders,’ ” Dorothy said, and Ruthie and Danny nodded. With another girl, Ruthie might have rolled her eyes and Danny would have shrugged, but the image of cheerful, saucy Dorothy in her blue-sprigged underpants and the big blue box of matches, Dorothy’s smooth white chest, her two chubby little mounds and her rosy nipples, and all of these very disturbing things together rose up in front of him when Dorothy spoke. Danny saw her sailing down a chute, brown curls gleaming in the sun. She climbed the ladder and Danny could see her bottom in her underpants. Dorothy smiled when Ruthie beat her and when Ruthie eyed the four gold lockets lying on Dorothy’s pink dresser, Dorothy put one in Ruthie’s hand. “ ’Til butter flies,” Dorothy said. “I can give you one too,” Dorothy said, and Danny put his hands in his pockets.
WHEN DANNY IS A teenager, and Ruthie has moved hundreds of miles away, he will find himself, with new friends in darkened movie theaters, watching horror movies in which some idiot feels the need to explore the dark, menace-filled basement. The entire movie audience shouts, “Don’t go in the basement!” but Danny never shouts. He grips the armrests and thinks, in the last row of the Playhouse Theater of Great Neck, he thinks, Dorothy Berman.
Letter from Gus
Trutzhain, Germany
April 1947
Dear Evie,
Spring is busting out here. More goddamn babies, more homely girls marrying schlemiels like there’s a white sale at Macy’s. We’re breeding. We got green grass. We got flowers. A small blue flower the little girls go crazy for. They make a game of weaving grass baskets and filling them with the flowers. They leave the baskets on people’s pillows. Not mine, but other people’s.
Hey, there, I’m now Gersh Hoffman, Jewish schoolteacher. Hey, you’ll say, where are the records of your life, Gersh Hoffman? I say I don’t know why no one can find my records. I say I was interned at Stringtown and Camp Forrest. The government people here are a little embarrassed about my deportation, so no one checks too carefully. As everyone here now knows, I’m here “through a shameful miscarriage of justice.” I’m quoting a visiting Brit who was glad to throw a little shit on the Americans. (Meanwhile, the Brits are practically chaining Jews to their bedposts to keep them from going to Palestine.) People want to get me home before another bad thing happens to me. They better fucking hurry.
Your Gus
25
On the Sunny Side of the Street
LUCKY JEWS. GUS THOUGHT THIS EVERY TIME HE STOOD IN THE steam of Stricoff’s bakery waiting for his rye bread, every time he caught a hot doughnut from the cart near the high school, every time he ate brisket at the railroad station luncheonette, watching the bookie in the corner booth go about his business. And lucky Gersh Hoffman, he thought. Just when the school board had decided that since they were going to have all these smart Jewish kids tumbling in, it might be good to have a few Jewish teachers of the right kind (preferably veterans, and truly American, preferably teaching math or Latin, the kinds of subjects troublemakers were not drawn to), Gersh Hoffman showed up, a limping, accentless, hawk-eyed Jewish teacher of math and engineering. Instantly hired at a decent salary after only one quick round with the Loyalty Oath (“I further swear that I do not advise, advocate or teach, and have not within the period beginning five years prior to the effective date of the ordinance requiring the making of this oath, advised, advocated or taught, the overthrowing by force, violence or other unlawful means, of the Government of the United States of America or of the State of New York …”), which he swallowed like cold coffee.
He was happiest in the stores. He shopped almost every day. Just the sight of food made him happy, and he loved the food of Great Neck. Six whole roast chickens, turning on a spit in the front window. Tuna fish decorated with a tomato rose, and a bowl of egg salad with the day of the week spelled out in olive slices. Sandwiches the size of lunch boxes. The German deli was run by a distant cousin of Kaiser Wilhelm and the Great Neck Jews loved the place; they flocked to Kuch’s. They said to one another, What a character he is, Otto, strictly old country, I’m telling you. Gus didn’t think that Negroes would rush to shop in a store run by some retired slave owner, eager to share memories of fun times on the plantation, praising Massa’s old-fashioned Mississippi charm. Jews were still chasing that absurd, wishful feather. Eventually, Jews would become like everybody else. They’d elevate smaller grievances; they’d cherish hurt feelings and ill treatment like they were signs of virtue.
In fifty years, Gus will read about Jewish young men and women writing long essays, even whole books, about their experiences as the grandchildren, or the grandnieces and -nephews, of Holocaust survivors, as if that entitled them to anything, and some of them will choose to tattoo the string of numbers on their forearms, and none of it surprises him.
We tried, he thought, watching the nice families drive to the synagogue, religious but not fanatic, the father parking about a block away, giving the wife a hand getting out of the Olds, then Sylvia, Rachel, and David climbing out and following, like ducklings in blue wool. All of us, the DPs, the soldiers who liberated the camps, even the survivors who came here—we tried to keep it from you. We protected America from what happened, like a man takes care of his wife. The man doesn’t mind when she closes her eyes at the scary part of the ride, of the movie. He loves her for that sweet, willful ignorance. She gives him something to protect, a nice world in which bad things don’t happen. It’s a pleasure, and a relief, to keep that ignorance intact, even as it comes between them.
As much as Gus loved the food and the bustle of Middle Neck Road’s sidewalks (a dozen different pairs of high heels, all staccato, a big-assed drum line), Gus loved the Chase National Bank even more, and he read everything he could about the bank and the Rockefellers; when Chase merged with the Manhattan Company, he followed the purchase like he had skin in the game. The Chase Bank was the archway through which Gus’s new and lucky life was running.
When all the real estate moguls and movie stars and orchestra leaders lost their shirts, their houses, their ridiculous racing yachts, and their unpaid-for Rolls-Royces, the sensible men at Chase foreclosed. George Dodge and Walter Chrysler and their friends moved out of Great Neck or moved on or died. The bank took back their half-timbered Tudors with carriage house, pool house, and pool, their Bauhaus-on-the-Sound, their Nantucket-style seventeen-acre estates with the white gravel circular driveways and Moorish lawn decorations, divided them into three and four and even six lots, and said, Someone’s got to buy them. And the Jews said, Please, let it be us. And the sensible men at Chase, who did not themselves live in Great Neck, said, Fine, we haven’t had a Jew since 1891, when that rich Irishman got a house for his own tailor, to always have him nearby, but, let it be Jews. Eventually, they would let African Americans buy too, but not in the 1950s. (Ralph Bunche, no. Joe Jones, a little later, yes, because every town needs a good taxi service, and eventually, East Asians, yes, with their very smart kids who frankly made the Jewish kids look like slackers, and when the Iranian Jews come in the 1970s, it’s the Ashkenazic version of Katie-bar-the-door, as far as Gus can see, but too late. Gus knew his history; unless you actually kill the people you have let move into your town, there is no getting them out. Their children will mix with your children. Sooner or later, their children will marry your children. Sooner or later, they will be jumping the broom and smashing a lightbulb in the same joyful, fierce move. Their children will be more beautiful than any child ever produced in your otherwise monochromatic family tree.)
The Jews came in, from Brooklyn and Queens. They came to houses near the railroad station and on Baker Hill, with cheap suitcases. They came in on the G.I. Bill, and the lucky veterans, who held the top tickets in the lottery, put their five hundred dollars in cash in an envelope and drove their in-laws’ cars from Flatbush Avenue to Ramsey Road. The Great Neck News carried prim editorials, complaining of dirty-faced city children dashing out of overcrowded moving vans, trailing firecrackers and bad habits from the outer boroughs. (Eventually, the rich men building Long Island Jewish Hospital, with their Jewish partners, told the editors to shut up and confine themselves to writing about the lovely rhododendrons of Kenilworth and the prompt service of the Fire Department, which they did. Five years later, the Great Neck News carried ads for Fein Furniture and the Cohen Brothers’ Steem-Cleaning.) The Jewish veterans moved their pregnant wives into three-bedroom houses, which looked a lot like the three-bedroom houses to the right and left of them. On summer nights, twenty-five noisy Jewish kids—and the occasional Castellano and O’Brien—poured into the wide streets, playing running bases or monkey in the middle or flipping baseball cards until someone’s little brother was left empty-handed and started to cry. They ran from one end of the block to the other, through six narrow backyards, chasing fireflies and one another and hurrying to watch Bobby Feldman throw himself out of the willow tree again. Gus had introduced himself to the two Mrs. Schwartzes, at either end of Ramsey Road, who made iced tea and lemonade and put plastic pitchers on a card table on the front lawn, and he’d met the fathers, accountants and shoe salesmen and furriers, called out “Hey, Koufax,” “Hey, Helen Keller, heads up!” and took turns throwing and catching for the kids until it was too dark.
