by Marge Piercy
“I saw Oblonsky last week. He was in Leningrad, you know. He says they’re starving.”
“Not literally,” Louise said acerbically. She disliked hyperbole.
“Quite literally. People are dying of hunger and the cold. He said they’re dropping in the thousands with no one to bury them.”
Louise was silent. She and Oscar had friends among the intellectuals and writers of Leningrad, a city they preferred to Moscow. Oscar spoke some Russian, and they had visited the Soviet Union in 1938. Finally she said, “I suppose we won’t know till the war is over what’s happened to everyone.” She sighed and Oscar at his end sighed too. “Oh, Gloria wrote Kay.”
“What did she have to say?”
“You’ll have to ask your daughter.”
“I’m sure Gloria is fine. She’s well insulated from the Nazis, and I can’t imagine why they’d take an interest in her. I do wish she’d get herself back here, but I suppose she sees little reason to pick up and leave. After all, she’s a citizen of a neutral power.”
“What’s on your mind, Oscar? I had two messages from you.”
“Sunday’s our anniversary. The seventh, right?”
“It was extraordinary for you to remember it the fifteen years we were married, all my friends used to tell me, but don’t you think it’s superfluous to note it since we’re divorced?”
“I still don’t know why you wanted a divorce—”
“It’s been final for a year now. Isn’t that late to debate it? I found it absurd being married to a man I was no longer living with.”
“Don’t let’s quarrel about that now. I thought it would be nice to have supper together for old time’s sake. After all, we’ll think about each other all evening anyhow. Why not do it together?”
“Are you asking me for a date, Oscar?” She sounded ridiculous, but she was playing for time.
“That’s what I’m doing. Wouldn’t it be rather sweet? We haven’t sat down in a civilized way and shared a good meal and a bottle of wine in ages. I’d love to tell you what I’m doing. And hear all your news too, of course.”
Oscar hated to let go of women. He tried to retain all his old girlfriends in one or another capacity, friends, colleagues, dependents, at least acquaintances. He was used to demanding his widowed mother’s attention still. He could not see why he should ever let go of any woman whose attendance he had enjoyed. He also knew how to manipulate her desire for advice and commiseration on her problems with Kay. She could not imagine ceasing to be curious about Oscar; one problem she had with all other men was comparing them to him. Dennis Winterhaven said she made Oscar into a myth, but he did not know Oscar.
“Come, Louie, why not? I’ll take you anyplace you want to go. But I’ve discovered a wonderful Spanish restaurant on Fourteenth, refugees of course, fine guitarist, perfect paella.”
She was supposed to see Dennis that evening, but not till seven. They were having supper and then he was taking her to hear Hildegarde at the Savoy. “I have plans for Sunday evening. But I could have Sunday dinner with you.”
“Pick you up at one?”
“Fine.” The moment she hung up she paced her office. Why had she agreed? Because she could not resist seeing him. She would be safe, seeing Dennis just afterward. Oscar was right, of course; she would spend the evening thinking of him. She wished she had the capacity to fall in love with Dennis. The dinner was theoretically rich in possibilities. How to use her skittery feelings? Her fingers sketched circles on the pad. She could not have a divorcée as heroine. They were only the occasional villainess in the slick magazines. She herself adored the racy sound of being a divorcée. She had graduated from dull wifehood, emerging a glorious tropical butterfly, but one with a wasp sting.
Could she get away with the couple being separated? Or would it have to be a man almost married, years before? That was safer. The anniversary was of the day they had almost married, but she had decided not to. Now why? Louise glanced at the clock. She had a couple of hours before dinner. She dug for the buried fantasy that lay in the bland story. That was her power, to exploit that vein like radioactive ore in rock, the uranium Madame Curie had worked; or, more honestly, a layer of butter cream in a cake, the power of fantasizing what women really wanted to happen. Let’s see, how about a widow? Widowed young? They weren’t into war deaths yet, but how about an accident? No blame attached, proceed at your own pace now. A second chance at a man you’d turned down or dropped for reasons you now know were unworthy. Yes, she would work that secret fantasy in married women that their idiot husband should suddenly drop dead and the one who got away came back on the scene. This was a sure seller.
What she needed was a good hook and a good title. A bouquet of yellow roses coming suddenly to the door. A mistake, surely. The memory years before. Call her Betsy. That’s a nice safe respectable-sounding name. It was a New England story, she decided, one of the ones she would set in her invented Cape Ann town of Glastonbury. A fisherman who went down in a storm? Or a commuting husband in a train accident? That would provide better class identification for her readers.
Funny how the phone call with Oscar set her off. She had often worked the effluvia of their life together for exploitable material. Growing up, Louise had never fantasized about being a novelist or a short story writer. She had wanted to be a journalist, a foreign correspondent, a Dorothy Thompson. She had written her first story when Oscar was out of work and Kay was a little girl and they had no money for rent. With the apartment they were renting in farthest Flatbush had come a shelf of Saturday Evening Posts, Ladies’ Home Journals, issues of McCall’s and Redbooks. They had not the money to buy a newspaper that winter. Oscar used to pick them up on the street after other people had read them.
That her story sold astonished her. She could still remember shopping on that money, buying chicken, lamb chops, buying Kay a real doll with hair and eyes that shut, buying Oscar a warm sweater and paying the back rent. The next one did not sell, nor did the next, but then she sold another. She began to study what worked and what didn’t; she analyzed stories they printed according to sociological and psychological profiles of acceptable heroines and heroes. She laid out the plots of twenty stories each from the six highest-paying magazines. She sharpened her focus and began to sell regularly.
The pen name was the one she had signed to her first story, when she noticed no Jewish names among the writers published and that women whose names implied marriage seemed to sell well. She had invented Annette Hollander Sinclair, and later when that lady became a popular writer of women’s fiction, she learned to become her for appearances. She bought Annette separate suits, hats, gloves, shoes, purses. She even had an Annette voice. Dennis, she thought, had fallen in love with Annette, which was probably why she was not in love with him. Oscar at least wanted to dine with Louise. Ashamed of herself, she began cautiously to look forward to Sunday. In the meantime she ran across the hall, changed into a comfortable smock and full peasant skirt, slipped her feet into furry bunnies and then resumed at her desk the story of Betsy whose husband died in a train wreck on the 5:15 commuter from North Station; and whose lover sent yellow roses and smiled enigmatically, whose laugh was boyish, but whose black roguish Asiatic eyes were borrowed from Oscar.
DANIEL 1
An Old China Hand
As Daniel Balaban crossed the bridge from the Harvard Business School, where he and his fellows were being housed, to the older Harvard on the Cambridge side of the Charles, he gazed at the crowds of undergraduates with as curious and wary an eye as he had the polyglot strollers in the Bund. He did not belong here. The Navy was playing a little joke on Harvard, having collected a wild assortment of sons of missionaries, naval career officers, old China hands who had been there on economic or military business over the last twenty years. Most of them had some Japanese, but others, like himself, only knew Chinese. The Navy had brought them here for a crash course in Japanese at the Yenching Institute in the yard. Daniel, the child of an immigr
ant Jewish family huddled in the Bronx, a student who had shown spotty ability and arrived at no particular ambition, at least none for which degrees were given, worked hard at his Japanese and looked around with surprise, pleased but also amused at his good fortune.
Daniel remembered the Depression well enough so that he was convinced he would never forget how hunger felt and how it reduced a person to nothing but itself. His father had come to the United States at fifteen from Kozienice in Poland. Gradually he had built up a small button business that prospered in the twenties. He believed in his adopted country and wanted only to do as the Americans did. He took Daniel and his older brother Haskel to see the Giants play, and he thanked his business contacts profusely for the stock market tips they passed on to him. They were doing well, very well, as in his dreams. It disappeared overnight, as if it never had been: fairy gelt. Daniel thought that neither of his parents had ever got over the shock of all that money melting into debts. Within two months, they were no longer prosperous and shortly after that, they were poor.
Uncle Nat, who had been a businessman in Germany, left as soon as Hitler assumed power. Thriving in Shanghai, Nat sent for his brothers. Uncle Mendel was working in France; Uncle Eli and Aunt Esther were doing very well, thank you, in Kozienice. In the Bronx, Daniel’s father received the passage money thankfully and set off to try his brother’s luck in Shanghai. Neither got rich, but they flourished, taipans, successful businessmen. Within six months, Daniel’s father sent for his family. They all went except Haskel, a brilliant if narrow student in premed at City College.
He could still remember how he and his sister Judy and his mother had eaten on the French boat that took them to China. They had traveled third class, but the food had been plentiful, so plentiful they could only talk about that their first week at sea. How much there was to eat. How often they ate. How they would eat just as much very soon. After three weeks on board, their gauntness was replaced by tanned flesh. His mother looked ten years younger. His sister Judy at sixteen was suddenly pretty.
Up until then, he had been an awkward child. Any ball thrown near him would hit him in the face, as if maliciously or as if compelled by some loadstone in his skull that called to it, so that by age fourteen, he had been wounded by baseballs, hard and soft, footballs, soccer balls, beach balls, tennis balls, Ping-Pong balls, basketballs; they had all in their turn attacked him and caused the anger and mockery of his fellows.
He had been a stubborn dreamy withdrawn child, fond of books about the dogs and cats and horses he could not have. His pets were two goldfish, Meeney and Moe. His mother kept warning him not to overfeed them, but that was the only thing he could do for them. One morning they floated belly up in their tiny bowl. He did not replace them. He would rather read Lad: A Dog or The Jungle Book. It seemed to him that wolves might be warmer, more attentive parents. In early childhood, he had been close to his mother, but the loss of their fine home, car, furniture, status, reduced her to apathy. She had talked to herself as she cleaned and cleaned their tiny crowded apartment. Although she now complained incessantly about China, she had a houseboy and a cook, and every day she went visiting with other married Jewish ladies.
Daniel’s family moved into a lane house in Hongkew, a poor, crowded, but enthralling northeastern suburb surrounded on three sides by water. They lived there because rents and food were half the price they were in the International Settlement or Frenchtown. Their house was one of a number of similar structures thrown up in a hurry, surrounded by a wall with a gate, chilly, heated with small and smelly coal stoves.
Daniel was sent to a school for American children in the International District, but school hours were not long and he could wander the streets much of the time. He bought from a street vendor some used Chinese clothes, which he hid in the wall. With his black hair, his heavy tan, his dark eyes, he did not look Chinese, but he could pass for Manchurian. If he had wandered dressed in European clothes, wearing his watch, he would have been attacked, robbed. Finding himself in an adventure of his own devising, he bloomed with new confidence. He imagined boys from the old neighborhood envying him, sorry they had not chosen him on their sandlot baseball teams, that even at stickball they had passed over him.
The streets were jammed and glittered with huge gilded signboards, flashing neon, enormous brightly colored murals advertising local products. He was growing fast and always hungry, but there was much to eat, all of it cheap: noodles, filled pao, tangtuan dumplings, sweet almond broth, sweet or salty cakes, salt fish and cabbage. He loved the races, the little Mongol ponies flashing past. He loved the steamers and sampans with painted eyes in the muddy harbor.
At the American school, no Chinese was taught. Few of their parents spoke Chinese or understood it. Uncle Nat said it was exactly the same at the other international schools and settlements. When his uncle saw that he was interested, he arranged for Daniel to have two tutors, one for conversational Mandarin and the other for reading and writing the characters. He studied with his two Chinese teachers far more avidly than with his teachers at the American school, because what he learned, he could practice at once in the streets where he always wanted to be.
“The Europeans and Americans act like fools,” Uncle Nat said, pointing out that the Americans would not let Chinese into their country club. “There’s no one in this world you can be sure of standing on. You come into someone’s country and you have a chance to be safe, to lead a good life, then you learn their customs and you speak their language, so you don’t offend more than you have to. If you spit into the wind, it comes back in your face. Understand?”
Uncle Nat was a grizzled man much like his father, but he stood differently, not stooped. He was sharply observant. Daniel felt more at ease with him than with his own father. Both his parents talked constantly of Haskel, piling up A’s at City College. The firstborn, the good son.
Shanghai was crowded, four million Chinese plus a hundred thousand foreigners, with modern skyscrapers, stylish Sikhs on little cement pedestals directing traffic, five universities, numerous scholarly and scientific institutions, fancy hotels and exclusive private clubs: but for most Chinese, there was poverty and a fast or slow death. In the mornings, corpses lay in the street as he went to school. Everywhere maimed beggars shook their cans. Shanghai was seething with diseases, as well as political unrest and assassinations. He watched prisoners beheaded and garroted for political or ordinary crimes, public executions where he stood in the crowd staring astonished at how casually life ended but taking care to look as blank as everybody else, to avoid trouble.
Then he caught a strain of paratyphoid that featured intestinal cramps so powerful that he could see them rippling his belly as he lay panting in high fever. After that initial fierce attack, it came back every month; then he seemed to outgrow it. He went on eating from booths and street vendors. He shot up to six feet. At sixteen, he bought his first sexual experience in the Kiangse Road red-light district, and unlike what his reading had led him to believe, he did not find it disgusting or blasting of his sensibility, but delightful, although incomplete because in no context.
After his initial sexual experiences, Daniel looked at women with a great deal of interest. He tried to do so on the sly, but apparently the wife of a doctor from Berlin noticed his interest. She seduced him, a task without difficulty once he grasped he was being offered what he most wanted. He had promptly fallen in love with her. Oh, so that was what he had been waiting for, that was what he had been expecting. There was sex and there were crushes, but when he put them together in a particular woman, it was a compelling new game, one that lasted into his first year at Shanghai University, when he began to make friends with two Chinese boys his own age and visit their homes.
The invading Japanese army approached the city. The Chinese troops burned much of Hongkew, the Japanese bombed the rest, and the Balabans moved reluctantly into smaller far more expensive lodgings in Frenchtown until once again lane houses were rapidly thrown up. Freq
uent bombings shook the ground, took out blocks. The train station was bombed and the dead lay uncounted. By 1938, Shanghai was cut off from the mainland and growing less profitable. Refugees from Germany and Austria were pouring in with frightening tales. Daniel’s parents grew increasingly nervous. It was time, they felt, to return to the Bronx.
He left China under protest, weeping openly. Judy was happy. She wanted the normal life of an American girl, she said loudly. Daniel had no desire for the normal life of an American boy, which he saw as a Saturday Evening Post cover, a freckle-faced country boy with a fishing rod. Nor did he long for fights with Italian and Polish kids on the embattled streets of the Bronx.
He attended City College. The political upheaval fascinated him as the streets of Shanghai had. He went to meetings of splinter groups, shopping the bazaar of ideas, unable to identify with any but hopeful that some ideology would ravish him into commitment. He lived at home and commuted, although he was restless with his parents, in whom he had not confided in years. He saw them as narrow, naive, sweet but parochial. Their life had been spent in survival stratagems. He expected quite other options. He did not enjoy the company of Haskel, now in medical school, on whom their mother waited like a body servant. Each brother found the other contemptible.
Every Tuesday and Wednesday after college, he took the IRT downtown to the Upper West Side, where there was a small community of midcoastal Chinese. There he took lessons with the owner of the Shanghai Star, upstairs in a little office overlooking the restaurant. Tuesday they had conversational lessons. Pao Chi was a big man, heavyset and bald, but his voice was melodious and gentle. He liked to discuss Taoism. On Wednesday they studied the characters. Just after the American New Year, Mr. Pao permitted him to do the calligraphy on a menu.