Mr. Yehuda Cohen had a long white beard like the ones I’d seen in pictures of biblical patriarchs, and he wore the same long black overcoat in all seasons. He came to Dundas Street to examine us and set the terms—three dollars per introduction. He smelled of fried fish, but he sent a procession of potential beshertehs.
In consideration of the novelty of a gentleman caller, Fanny let us take the dusty, yellowed sheets off the furniture in the living room, where we’d never been allowed to sit before. (“The couch is old. I don’t have money to buy a new one when it falls apart,” she had always said.) I piled stacks of library books in front of the jars of floating eyeballs to hide them.
On the morning of my mother’s first date, I walked with her to the beauty parlor on Wabash Avenue so she could get a henna tint in her hair. That afternoon, as she let me dab my own rouge on her cheeks and brush her lashes with my Maybelline, I studied the face I’d loved so much. What would a suitor think? The years in East Los Angeles had really aged her. There were fine little wrinkles all around her eyes and deep lines between her eyebrows that gave her a permanently pained expression. Her cheeks, which had been firm and opalescent, looked saggy and sallow. I was stung by my love for her, which was even greater now that she no longer looked young and beautiful. “Please let him be nice to her. Please let him be a loving man,” I prayed to I-didn’t-know-who.
Jake Mann’s hair was marcelled into shiny, tight blond waves, and he wore electric blue or burnt sienna suits. “What a little doll!” he said in a gravelly voice as I went to the kitchen to fix him a glass of tea on his first visit. His fingers clasped my hand instead of the glass when I handed it to him, making the dark liquid slosh over the rim. “Oh, she burned her pretty fingers,” he said to no one in particular, relieving me of the glass and then lifting my hand to his mouth for a wet kiss—“to make it feel good.”
He invited my mother out for “cocktails.” “You’re invited too.” He winked at me.
“He’s a real sport,” my mother said, glowing, when she came back after midnight. I’d waited up, sleepless, missing her cruelly. “He took me to a nice place for a Tom Collins. Then he took me to Chinatown for a big dinner.” In her fingers she twirled a yellow toothpick-and-paper umbrella, which she proffered to me as though I were six years old. “It was in the Tom Collins,” she said, beaming.
I took it from her, holding it awkwardly in my palm. What was I supposed to do with it?
Mr. Mann came to take my mother out again the next week. “So where’s that little princess?” I could hear him from the bedroom.
“Why don’t you go say hello?” my mother asked me when she came in for her purse.
If she married Mr. Mann, we’d all have to live together until I finished high school. More than three years. So I had to be friendly. I followed her out. “Say, give us a hug,” Jake Mann said avuncularly. He pulled me to him, pressing himself against me for what seemed like a long time. I broke away, befuddled. My mother stood at the front door, purse in hand, smiling like a stranger, waiting for him. I’d never had a fatherly hug. Was I imagining things?
“He really knows how to treat a lady,” my mother said at the end of the evening, and her face looked bright and a little excited. I marveled how quickly she’d gotten into the spirit of this thing. She sat on her bed, and I watched as she rolled her seamed nylons down her still-lovely legs. “He’s a nice dresser, too. Not like Moishe,” she sighed, “but still nice. And he took me to an Italian restaurant, and then we went on a wonderful drive near the beach and saw the stars.” She enumerated Mr. Mann’s virtues and her pleasure. “On Sunday he wants to take us both to Ocean Park Beach,” she said, pulling her pale pink nightgown over her head.
I remembered Mr. Mann’s tight hug. “No, you go alone with him,” I said lightly, rummaging through my mind for an excuse that would keep me home.
“He wants to take us both. You come too,” my mother insisted, pulling the covers over herself. I got up to turn the light off, then lay in the dark in a muddle of feelings while my mother breathed softly in sleep.
“Whoop! Where’s the bathing suit?” Jake Mann exclaimed on Sunday morning when he saw me in a white skirt and blouse. “We’re all going swimming on such a beautiful day.”
My mother wore her green one-piece bathing suit under a floral print dress. “Put your suit on underneath,” she encouraged me. “It’s a beautiful day to go in the water.”
Jake Mann opened the rear door of his long automobile for me, and as I slid in, I felt his hand brush lightly against my buttocks. I turned to look at him, astonished. But what could I say there in his car, my mother in the front seat? Perhaps I’d imagined it, or maybe it was an accident.
In the beach parking lot he stripped down to his bathing suit, and my mother did the same. “We’ll lock our clothes in the trunk,” he said. “That way we don’t have to worry about them when we go into the water.” I disrobed, self-conscious, not knowing what else to do. He handed my mother a blanket to carry, and he took a little portable radio from the trunk.
I felt his eyes inspecting my black two-piece suit, my thighs, my breasts, as he walked between me and my mother down to the beach. I was aware of the oppressively huge expanse of his naked flesh next to me, the blond-gray hairs that covered his chest and legs and arms.
My mother spread the blanket, plopped down, snapped on the radio. “Hey there, you with the stars in your eyes,” she hummed along with Frank Sinatra.
“Let’s go for a swim!” Mr. Mann seized my hand and held me up just as I was about to sink down near her, onto the gay red and green stripes.
“I don’t know how to swim,” I told him, forcing myself not to sound sullen and pulling my fingers away. “Why don’t you two go?” I turned to my mother.
“You never taught her to swim?” he scolded. “What’s the idea of that? I’ll teach her.”
“Go, Lilly, let him teach you how to swim.” My mother smiled contentedly at the sun.
He pulled at my arm. “Up-sy!” He grinned and lifted me to my feet, ignoring my protestations that the water was too cold for me. “Don’t be a scaredy-cat,” he said.
I walked down to the water with him. How was I supposed to act? Didn’t my mother see that there was something funny in the way Mr. Mann behaved with me? And there was something else troubling me. I’d seen men in bathing suits before, of course, but the sight of Jake Mann down below was disquieting. His member looked huge under the flimsy red material of his trunks. Didn’t everyone see the funny way it protruded? Wasn’t he embarrassed by it? By the time we reached the water, the red strip looked like a little tent under his belly. Alarm fought with nausea inside me. Where could I put my eyes?
The water felt frigid on my feet. “Come on, don’t act like a teeny, tiny baby,” he mocked, dragging me by the hand. Would he drop my mother if I insulted him? How could I keep him for her but keep him away from me? I half went and half was pulled deeper into the water. I couldn’t protect my thighs, my belly, my chest, from its iciness. My teeth chattered.
“I’m going to teach you to swim,” he said, his voice still jovial and booming above the waves. “You’re old enough to know how, for God’s sake. Now lay down against my hand and I’ll show you to kick.” He pushed the back of my head down and my legs went up, then he held me afloat with his hand on my belly. At least the lower part of him was covered by the water and I didn’t have to see it. “Okay, keep your legs straight and kick. I’ve got you. Nothing to worry about,” he said now in a businesslike manner.
I couldn’t stop shivering. It was hard to breathe. I kicked as he commanded me to, and he moved us some steps farther from the shore. What if I couldn’t touch the ocean floor with my feet? What if the water was above my head? I would be at his mercy. The ocean was huge around us, and I didn’t know how deep it was below me now. I swiveled my head quickly to look at him, and water filled my nose. I coughed and sputtered and clutched at his arm.
“Don’t get scared. You’re doi
ng good,” he told me. I relaxed my clutch and kept kicking. “Atta girl!” he said.
Then he righted me and dropped his hand from my belly. I could feel the bottom with my feet and sighed in relief. I stood on tiptoe to keep my head well above the water.
“Now, how about a little thank-you kiss for your first lesson.” He grinned hideously, a huge shark in the middle of the ocean. He pulled my chin up with one hand and clamped his mouth down on mine. With the other hand he pulled my buttocks toward his member.
I struggled, and the undulating water pushed me off balance. His mouth was hard on mine, his hand firm on my buttocks, keeping me upright. I felt him rub against me.
“Stop it,” I freed my mouth and shouted. There were other people in the water but no one close by. If I broke away from him, would I drown?
“Come on, be a good girl,” he said, knocking his hips against me, not relinquishing his hold on my buttocks. “Don’t you like it?”
“Goddammit, leave me alone!” I snarled in the most menacing voice I could muster. He tightened his grip, and my nails raked down his wet back with all the strength in my fingers. He dropped his hand, looked surprised and startled. I broke free and landed on tiptoe, my chin barely above the water. I swerved toward the shore, not looking back, my arms and hands flailing to push the ocean aside until I got to the shallow water.
“Little bitch,” I heard him sneer a good distance behind me. But he wasn’t following me. I hobbled frantically through the water and then over the sand, breathless, back to the blanket and my mother.
She sat there, still placid, innocent of thought. “That’s what a woman is for,” Peggy Lee was singing on the radio. “Where’s Jake?” my mother asked, smiling. “Did he show you how to swim?”
How could I answer her? I scrutinized the water, but he was nowhere in sight. Maybe he’d drowned.
This was the same strip of beach where I’d written IRENE SANDMAN over and over in the wet sand. I held the thought of her violet eyes now, like a holy relic.
Later Mr. Mann came lumbering, scowling and silent, across the sand. “How’d you get so many scratches? Your back’s bleeding,” my mother cried, touching his skin solicitously.
“I fell on those lousy rocks out there,” he said, tossing his hand in the direction of our combat.
Whenever the phone rang during the next weeks I heard my heart thud in my ears, but it was always for Fanny. “I don’t understand,” my mother said. “I thought we got along so good.” And then, maybe a month later, I saw her standing in front of the dresser mirror, her fingers lifting her cheeks. “I hear Marlene Dietrich had four facelifts,” she said.
“You don’t need a facelift. You’re beautiful,” I told her, meaning it, but she didn’t seem to hear me.
“‘Mary, you have such shining eyes, such lichtege eigen,’ Moishe used to say to me,” my mother sighed. “All gone now. Nothing left of it.”
I kept my secret about why Jake Mann had disappeared because I thought it was better for her to be a little hurt and baffled than to learn the truth. But anxiety squeezed at my chest whenever I thought of him. “Let’s forget the husband,” I wanted to tell my mother. Yet how could we? Nothing had changed. Not a single problem had gone away.
“So one don’t work out, what’s to worry?” Mr. Cohen said with good cheer. He had many more names on his list, and for three more dollars there was always another.
Shmuel Glatt, a redheaded German Jew, was next. Shmuel had numbers tattooed on his forearm from the concentration camp where he’d lost his whole family. He was stocky and short, barely taller than my mother. His small brown eyes had heavy undershadows that gave him a permanent lugubrious look, but he smiled a lot and told jokes in long strings, like Eddie Cantor or Jack Benny. His Yiddish accent was heavy, and it made his jokes, which were almost always about anti-Semites (antizsemeeten, he called them), funnier—or more disturbing. So Rasputin says to Czar Nikolai, “Your Majesty, the Jews are complaining that you’re anti-Semitic. For that, you should kill them all.” “They’re damn liars,” the Czar says. “I’m not anti-Semitic, and I’ll prove it. I’m only going to kill half of them.” So a Jew is walking in the street, and he bumps into a Nazi. “Swine,” says the Nazi. “Pleased to meet you. I’m Garfinkel,” the Jew says. So Mr. Horowitz goes into this nice restaurant and sits down. And the goy waiter comes over to him and says, “We don’t serve Jews here.” “That’s okay,” Horowitz says. “Jews I don’t eat. Give me a vegetable soup.”
My mother didn’t know how to react to Shmuel Glatt in the beginning, but later she laughed at his jokes, and I did too. She dressed in the New York clothes whenever he came, and she put on the Emir I’d bought her for Chanukah. In the months she went out with him, she had hardly any spells. I was a little sad that it wasn’t I who had the power to make them go away, but the important thing is, he’s good for her, I told myself.
“He’s a gentleman,” she said after their third or fourth date. I’d heard them on the porch. He asked her for “a kiss goodnight,” and there was a brief silence. “I had a very nice time, Shmuel,” she said less than a minute later, and then I heard her key in the door.
He’ll do, I thought. He even brought me Baby Ruth candy bars and Hershey with almonds, as though I were a kid, extracting them from a pocket on the inside of his jacket and presenting them to me with a magician’s flourish. If my mother had to marry someone—and she did—Mr. Glatt wouldn’t be a bad choice. He was all right.
It was his lantsman Falix Lieber, with whom he’d been liberated, barely alive, from the Bergen Belsen extermination camp, who became the bogeyman that lodged in my psyche and shook me for a long time.
“I got three free tickets for the Workmen’s Circle bazaar,” Shmuel Glatt announced one Saturday evening. “We’ll have pickelehs there, we’ll have gribbines mit schmaltz there, we’ll have bellyaches there,” he sang. It was there that my mother and I met Falix. “He helped me so much in the camp,” Shmuel said, serious now, clapping Falix’s back when he introduced him. Falix was in his thirties, with dusky skin and a soft black beard and hooded dark eyes set deep in his head. He wore a white shirt with half-rolled sleeves, his tattoo of numbers visible, like Shmuel’s. Falix kept an arm around his seven-year-old daughter, Shayna, to whom he spoke in Yiddish. “Maydeleh, little girl,” he called her. Later in the evening I watched as he fed her right out of his hand from the potato knish that he’d bought, lifting it to her pretty lips and then taking the tiniest nibble of the heavy dough himself, making her giggle immoderately.
“And you, maydeleh?” He turned to me after they’d finished the knish. “You want me to feed you too?”
I shook my head no, feeling foolish.
“And why not?” He winked at me. He followed us around the bazaar, never letting go of Shayna except to buy a dish of ice cream, which then he fed her and himself alternately, from the same spoon.
“So what do you do for a living?” he asked me.
Was he joking? Didn’t he know I was a kid? “I’m in junior high school,” I answered, discomfited by my own bashfulness. “In the ninth grade.”
“Without Falix there wouldn’t be a Shmuel Glatt here today,” I heard Shmuel tell my mother again, tears in his small eyes. We all sat together and waited for the balalaika concert to begin. “I was ready to die. What did I need to keep living for? ‘No,’ Falix says. ‘You have to show those bastards.’ He made me eat when I didn’t want to eat anything. He made me keep up my strength.”
The next Sunday, when Shmuel banged on our screen door, Falix was right behind him. “On such a nice day I’ve come to drive everybody to the park,” Falix announced. He wore a hat well back on his head, and the sleeves of his white shirt were rolled up again, exposing the terrible tattoo. “Madam.” He extended his arm for me to take in imitation of Shmuel, who walked down the porch steps with my mother on his arm.
“Come on, Lilly. You come too,” my mother said happily, still holding on to Shmuel’s arm as she stood
near Falix’s old DeSoto.
“Madam?” Falix repeated more emphatically, his arm still extended at an exaggerated angle, and I took it, not knowing what else to do, and let him lead me into the front seat of his car. My mother and Shmuel climbed into the back.
“We better walk faster,” I told Falix in the park. He’d insisted we stroll arm-in-arm, like my mother and Shmuel, and I felt self-conscious and embarrassed. “They’re way ahead of us.”
“Yes, but who’s got the car keys?” he answered with a wink. “When they need to go home, they’ll come back and find us. Sit here.” He led me to a bench under a tree.
“They’ll be worried,” I said, struggling awkwardly to free my arm from his grip as we sat on the bench. Maybe he saved Shmuel’s life, but he was acting a little like Jake Mann, I thought. I was irritated with my mother for making me come with them and then abandoning me.
“Relax,” he said, placing his arm around my shoulder. “Who’s going to hurt you? Am I hurting you?” He lifted my chin and looked into my eyes. I tried to rise, but he pulled me back, planting his lips on mine, ignoring my push at his chest.
I wasn’t strong enough to get him away from me. Where was my mother? When would someone come by? Finally he took his mouth from mine. “Don’t you know how to kiss?” he whispered. “A big girl like you? What would it hurt if I showed you?” I struggled against him again, pushing at his shoulders, trying to clamp my mouth. It was useless. There was no more fight in me. I relaxed my hands, my lips. I let myself sink, like a drowned girl. My mother had disappeared. “Isn’t this nice?” he raised his head to say, and returned to my lips.
But then his hand cupped my breast, and a shiver waved through me when his fingers moved over my nipple. “Don’t,” I said with clenched teeth, and my hand flew up to stop him.
“Maydeleh, what’s the excitement?” he laughed and crooned. “What’s so bad here?” He bent to my lips again, his breath warm on me, his hand on my breast again. My own hand covered his, but I didn’t try to remove it.
Naked in the Promised Land Page 9