Naked in the Promised Land

by Lillian Faderman

  On the first morning of the High Holidays, before it was time to go to the synagogue, My Rae called me into the dining room. She was wearing a beautiful new dress, with gold disks running all the way down the front, and she held up its miniature, an exact copy, and buttoned me into it with nimble fingers. “For Rosh Hashanah.” She turned me round and round to examine her handiwork. “Oy vee shayn, how beautiful!” she exclaimed. “Who’s the love of Rae’s life?” she sang as she puffed my sleeves and fiddled with my collar.

  I looked down at myself. I adored the Robin Hood color, the big gold buttons that were just a little smaller than hers, the way we matched. “Who’s the love of Lilly’s life?” I sang back, making sure to keep my voice low so my mother wouldn’t hear.

  The next week, I sat again with my mother and aunt in the cramped upstairs hall of the Breed Street Synagogue while the men downstairs droned their Yom Kippur pleas to Yahweh, and the women above who could read Hebrew bent over their prayer books and chorused along with them. When it was time to say yizkor, the memorial prayer for the dead, we kids were superstitiously ushered out. “Hurry, go,” the mothers said, shooing us, because only those whose loved ones had died said yizkor or even remained in a room where it was being said. I hurried off, as superstitious as the grownups. I sat on the concrete steps, watching some girls play a quarreling game of hopscotch in front of the synagogue, until, twenty minutes or so later, a big kid came out and called to his little brothers down the street, “Hey, get back here, I think they’re finished.”

  “Why did you say yizkor for them?” I could hear my mother even as I was walking back through the upstairs doors. Her eyes blinked out of control. “You louse,” she hissed at my aunt’s face. “Hirschel’s not dead! You want to kill him by making believe he’s dead?”

  There was spit on my aunt’s cheek. She swiped at her face with the sleeve of her dress. “Mary, control yourself in the shul,” she whispered hoarsely.

  The people in the rows around us who’d been fanning themselves against the heat with prayer books or pledge envelopes stopped and stared. The loud davening of the men downstairs could not drown out the whispers of my mother and My Rae.

  “They’re not dead! None of them! How do you know they’re dead?” My mother forgot now to try to whisper.

  “Shaddup for the baby at least,” My Rae moaned.

  “You lousy bitch!”

  My Rae jumped up and sidled out, knocking against the legs of the women in our row.

  “What’s going on here?” a large angry woman in a black cloche demanded.

  “Mishugenehs, crazy people,” a lady in a polka-dot blouse yelled. Her eyes were red from yizkor weeping.

  Now my mother jumped up, following My Rae, shoving aside the same legs.

  “Tsk! Tsk! Tsk! Tsk!” I heard all around, and a buck-toothed girl sitting down the row bent over to stare at me as though I were a bug.

  “Excuse me,” I begged, passing the legs. “Excuse me. Excuse us,” and I fled down the synagogue stairs after my mother and my aunt.

  The week before Thanksgiving, the teacher passed out big new boxes of Crayolas and white stenciled sheets, and I lost myself in the lavish variety of the wax sticks. Tongue between my teeth, I gripped the Crayolas and colored Indian faces Carmine Red (because we’d been told they were red men) and pilgrim dress Midnight Black and Earth Brown. I solved the problem of their “white” English skin by leaving their faces and hands uncolored. Chartreuse and magenta and teal were the colors of the heaps of food they shared with the red men. I yearned for a peace in our house like the peace between the pilgrims and the Indians. Those idyllic afternoons at Hollenbeck Park were already a far memory. They fought all the time now.

  “Forget the past!” My Rae always yelled at my mother. “Forget Moishe, he should grow a cancer in his heart! Forget Europe.”

  But my mother couldn’t. “Moishe would have married me, but you had to take us away.”

  “He wanted you to go again for another abortion,” my aunt once hollered in her own defense. “He told you to give her up for adoption,” she shouted another time.

  Both times my mother pulled me to her, protecting me again from annihilation (and letting my aunt know to whom I belonged). “I would die first,” she vowed ferociously each time, as though the threats against me were imminent still.

  That Thanksgiving morning I jumped out of bed and raced. I’d heard my mother’s voice screaming from the dining room, “You choleryeh, you cholera-infected one! You brought me and the baby to this dump, and now you’re going to leave us alone?” She stood in her thin nylon nightgown, its straps fallen to her arms, looming over my shriveled aunt. My Rae looked as paper-pale as the pilgrims in my crayoned pictures. She was dressed, a brown coat buttoned up to her chin, a little navy hat perched on her head. She gripped a bulging cardboard valise.

  “What are we supposed to do now? Answer me!” My mother’s breasts flopped as she moved, and my breath caught at the glint in her eyes that was like those of the crazy women I’d seen in a movie, The Snake Pit. And we were alone, the three of us, because Fanny had left the night before to spend Thanksgiving at the eye doctor’s house.

  “Lilly!” my aunt cried when she saw me. “If I go I can help you.” She straightened and ran to draw me to her, but I squirmed to get away. She knew she mustn’t do that in my mother’s presence! She pulled me back, and my nose shoved against her bosom, choking me. “Shepseleh, meineh.” She kept her fingers on my head. “I can’t do anything for you if I stay here.”

  I broke free and ran to my mother’s side. What was happening here? What did my mother mean, “leave us alone”?

  “With Mr. Bergman I can make a home and help you.”

  What was she talking about?

  “Do you know what that bloodsucker is doing?” my mother bellowed.

  My aunt moved toward the door, my mother at her heels. I held on to the table, my head thrumming, the floor tilting. Then I forced my knees to unbuckle, and I bolted after them.

  “Do you know what she’s doing?” my mother shrieked again.

  Now, through the glass panes on the door I saw a little man in a brown hat walk up the porch steps. He opened the screen door and rang the bell formally, though he must have spied the three of us peering at him from the other side. We froze for an instant, all four of us, like characters in a funny papers cartoon. Then my aunt unfroze, opened the door, and shut it behind her.

  “My Rae! No!” I cried.

  “Don’t go after that louse!” My mother’s arm held me back.

  I broke away and threw myself at the door, but my hand remained stuck to the doorknob, as though under a spell. They stood on the porch. I could see my aunt’s shoulders heaving. Mr. Bergman, who’d taken his hat off in her presence, held it in one hand and patted her back with the other. He moved his lips, saying words I couldn’t hear. She turned to look back at us, and I opened my mouth to cry “Come back,” but nothing came out. He was old, much older than my aunt, with a bald head and a kind, round face, and he wore an immaculate beige suit and polished brown shoes. He put his arm around her, led her to a black car that was parked in front of the house, settled her in, and drove off with her.

  “Do you know what that choleryeh is doing?” my mother yelled. “She’s getting married!”

  My mother and I live in the front bedroom of Fanny Diamond’s house. Though my mother often says we’re going back to where we came from, the black metal trunk that we brought with us from New York stands unpacked. It makes up part of the furniture in our room. Through the years, my dresses and blouses and skirts that can’t fit on the hook behind the door I pile on top of the trunk, my only closet. In my mother’s small closet are stuffed all the dresses she used to wear when she went to see her lover.

  If the window shades were up, there might be sunshine in our room, but they’re always down, hiding us because we’re separated from the pavement outside by only a two-foot swath of grass. But the shades have serious rip
s on their sides, and if a peeping tom or kids egging each other on want to, they can peek in and see my mother running naked up and down our narrow room, bumping into the twin beds, the dresser, our metal trunk, tearing her hair until it stands straight up. “Hirschel,” she cries to her crippled brother. “I didn’t kill you! Don’t you know how I love you?” I close the door so that Fanny won’t hear her, but I can’t do anything about the people who walk by on Dundas Street and can see and hear it all.

  I run back and forth in the room, following my mother, keeping up with her pace, two chickens cut down from the noose. “He’s okay, Mommy. He’s not dead.”

  “Zay hargenen yidden, they’re killing Jews!” Her eyes are shut tight, and she screams as though under her lids she can see it. “Gevalt! Help! I did a terrible thing!” she shrieks with her mouth open wide. When she drops onto her bed, I cradle her head; I smooth her wet forehead; I place the tenderest kisses on her ash-colored face. I know I am all she has in the world.

  When I’m home alone, I watch myself in the mottled dresser mirror as I practice my routines. I recite “To Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street” in my six-year-old-boy voice, but with dramatic flourishes and great urgency. How will I get a job as an actress? What can I do to get discovered? If my mother didn’t have to go to the shop every day, she could rest and get well. ” When my baby smiles at me, “I belt out my sing-say. I throw my head back, hand on hip, shoulder forward. I lift my skirt to my thigh and pose my leg. Would I look more like Betty Grable if I could dye my hair blond?

  One Saturday I was startled from sleep by my mother, hair spiked, a wild woman, banging on her head with her fists. “I killed him! Oh, my God, help me!”

  I jumped up and took my place behind her in the chicken dance. “It’s okay, Mommy. He’s okay. Everything’s okay.” Where was My Rae? Who else could help me with my poor sick mother? Come back, I need you, I can’t do this alone! But I didn’t even know where to phone her.

  It was afternoon before my mother stopped, like a wound-down clock. She flopped onto her bed, stared at the ceiling like someone hypnotized, then sank finally into sleep. I sat on the edge of the bed, watching over her, a mother with a sick child. The world was silent except for her soft snores. What would become of us? Through the ripped window shade, I looked out at a slice of empty street.

  When a black car stopped in front of the house, I leaped to my feet and pulled up the shade. She was here. But for how long? Had she changed her mind? I watched as they both got out. My aunt was wearing a shiny dress that came down to her ankles, and a gardenia corsage was pinned at her heart. Mr. Bergman was decked out too, in a powder blue suit, smiling amiably. My aunt’s eyes were red and puffy, and she carried a big cooking pot in her hands.

  My head buzzed and bumbled. She was here. Finally. But not to stay. I raced to the front door, but Fanny had already opened it, and I lagged behind her, suddenly shy before that stranger with a pot.

  “Look what I brought for your supper,” my aunt cried when she saw me.

  I hadn’t eaten all day, and I could smell the gedempfte flaysch even through the screen door. At the rich odor my stomach rose, but I ignored it. It had been weeks since I’d laid eyes on My Rae. I loved her more than anything in the world, except for my mother. How could she have abandoned me? “Go away!” I shouted from behind Fanny and saw Mr. Bergman’s expression change from amiability to shock and then sternness. I wanted to scream at her, You said that when I was a baby you held me to your heart and I crawled right in forever, and now you’ve left us alone to get married! But all I yelled before I ran back to my sleeping mother was, “I don’t want your gedempfte flaysch.”

  Fanny Diamond was not a witch, she was a schnorrer. That’s what my mother and My Rae called a stingy person who acts like a beggar. She owned the kosher chicken market on the corner, and she also owned the dark little grocery store next door to the chickens, where you could buy sour pickles from briny barrels. But every afternoon Fanny donned her dead husband’s woolen overcoat and wing-tipped shoes in order to preserve the raggedy dresses and down-at-the-heels shoes that were her daily costume, and, almost disappearing in the clothes of someone who’d been a head taller and a hundred pounds heavier, she watered the tiny patch of manicured lawn in front of our house’s tattered screens and chipped stucco. “You live there?” my schoolmates said, fascinated and repelled when they found out that I shared the dilapidated, spooky house on Dundas Street with the witch lady.

  Fanny must have heard my mother’s wailing, but if she knew what went on behind our closed door, she never let on. Maybe she figured that since my mother went to work every morning, as though she were perfectly well, and paid the forty dollars’ rent on the first of every month without fail, nothing very bad could be happening behind the door.

  Or maybe she figured that she would help where she could and not interfere where she couldn’t. From her daughter Ruthie’s home in Beverly Hills she brought me barely worn, maid-starched, and maid-ironed dresses—a peach organdy with puffed sleeves and an orange-ribboned belt, a yellow dotted swiss with a Peter Pan collar, a dress-up buttons-and-bows green velvet. Sally and Becky, her granddaughters, had outgrown them, and Fanny’s daughter wanted to give them away to somebody who needed them. Of course the dresses didn’t stay in mint condition for long, but at least now I had a lot of different clothes to wear. “Little momzer,” Fanny called me affectionately when we were alone together. I didn’t learn until I was an adult and she was long dead that momzer means “bastard.”

  Not only did Fanny give me her granddaughters’ dresses, she gave me her wisdom too. “So, what do you want to be?” she asked one afternoon as I sat at the kitchen table reading a comic book and she stood at the sink eating sardines out of a can.

  “I dunno,” I answered, a little embarrassed. “Maybe an actress.” I’d wanted success always for the sake of my mother, but that ambition had become a part of who I was, and now I wanted it for myself too. Yet I was almost ten years old, and I’d made no progress toward realizing my glorious dream. I still didn’t know how to begin.

  “Don’t be a silly girl,” Fanny said, confirming my fears. “Everybody wants to be an actress, but how many actresses do you see in the world?”

  In fact, I’d just recently been thinking of a backup plan. Unlike child stardom, which would allow me to rescue my mother right away, with this new plan she’d have to wait for years, but still, it was better than nothing. I remembered seeing Myrna Loy play a judge in The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer, and I had just seen Katharine Hepburn play an attorney in Adam’s Rib. They wore gorgeous dresses and had beautiful hairdos and lived in big fancy houses. “Maybe I’ll be a lawyer, then,” I told Fanny with a shrug.

  She cackled. “Narreleh, little fool, poor girls don’t become lawyers. You better pay good attention in school and you can be a secretary. Like that you can help out your poor mother.”

  I felt a hot sting in my eyes. She couldn’t be right. Mrs. Patrick, my teacher, had told us about Abraham Lincoln, who was poor, and he became the president. “In America anyone can become anything,” she’d said. Why shouldn’t I believe it? Mrs. Patrick knew more than Fanny.

  ***

  Every night as I’m trying to fall asleep I comfort myself with happy fantasies. Lights! Camera! Action! and I, dressed in star-spangled leotards and a star-spangled top hat, break into my whirling, twirling, high-kicking, splits-in-the-air tap dancing routine. Fred Astaire and Danny Kaye dance beside me, beaming broadly at their little co-star’s brilliance.

  But those child star images give way after a while to images from my comic books. Sometimes I’m clad in red tights, like Mary Marvel, sometimes in blue tights, like Supergirl. Lilly the Kid, that’s who I am. Always I fly through the air with a muscled mighty man on one side of me and a muscled mighty boy on the other. I name our missions, and they follow. We grab up into the air the evil men with big lips and Homburg hats, and we deposit them behind jail bars before they can do more harm
to women and children. We rescue emaciated and terrified victims, like those I’ve seen in the movie newsreels, who are only seconds away from their death in concentration camp ovens.

  My mother doesn’t know for a long time that I am Lilly the Kid, the real brain behind these great deeds that fill the movie newsreels and the Yiddish papers. And then I tell her. Mighty Man and Mighty Boy stand at my side and confirm what I say.

  “I’m so proud of my big girl,” she tells me every night in my fantasy before I drop off to sleep.

  A half-dozen kids from my fourth-grade class stood in a knot on the playground, entranced by the story that Melvin Kaplan and his little sister were telling: “She was walking down the street all naked. Her titties and everything was showing.” A couple of them tittered, the rest opened wide eyes. “Our dad saw her. It was like six o’clock in the morning.” Melvin and his sister raced each other to tell it. “And then somebody calls an ambulance and says, ‘There’s a naked lady walking on the street,’ and they came to take her away. My dad says they put her in a place for crazy people.”

  Now they all giggled, and I could hear my heart pounding as though some animal were trying to break out of it.

  “And you know what else?” the sister shrieked. “She was sucking on her own titties when the ambulance came. On her own titties!” she yelled, outdoing her brother, relishing the detail.

  The girls from my class let out sounds of disgust; a boy whooped.

  It was Arthur Grossman’s mother they were talking about. Arthur, a boy with curly black hair and large black eyes who looked so much like me that he could have been my brother. He wasn’t in school the rest of that week, and when he returned the following Monday, he had a sheepish look, as though he’d done something wrong. On the playground he wandered around by himself, pretending to examine ant trails or little pebbles. I watched him. I wanted to say something to him, but I didn’t know what words to use.