Naked in the Promised Land

by Lillian Faderman

“Yeah, this house has quite a history,” he said. “Would you like to see some more of it? I can give you the Cook’s tour.”

  Was it once really Harry Houdini’s mansion? I could imagine the star-studded parties—the Pola Negris and Clara Bows and Mabel Normands in lavish, flowing gowns who’d once paraded in its romantic opulence.

  He led me through the glass door that opened onto the marble patio, and he walked in front of me up the winding staircase. The maid who’d offended him wasn’t in sight. “Would you look at this tapestry.” He pointed to a carpet that covered most of the wall at the head of the stairs. Through its muted colors I could make out horses and bare-chested riders with shields who were lifting up or treading down naked, terrified women. “Seventeenth-century French,” he pronounced, like an art connoisseur.

  “This is my favorite room.” He put his hand on the small of my back familiarly, and I let myself be steered through a door of ornately carved black wood into a chamber of mirrored walls, shiny mahogany bedposts, a dark fur bedspread.

  “It’s beautiful,” I said inanely. Then he pulled me to him. I averted my face and could see his left hand with the missing fingers digging into my shoulder.

  “Wouldn’t you like me to triple your shoot fee? A hundred and fifty dollars,” he rasped.

  The green vision of bills snaked round in my head. A hundred and fifty dollars was almost four weeks’ wages for a lot of women, and I could make it in a few hours. His spicy cologne mixed with the sour smell of his sweat. I stared at the mangled hand that sat on me. My mother. Her abortions. “No! My parents are expecting me.” The words flew from my lips on their own. “I’ve got to get home.”

  “What are you, a little girl?” he scoffed, and his mouth came down on mine.

  A panicked voice inside me cried, “Bite his tongue!” but the image of his innocuous face on the silent screen rose before me. He’s got Hollywood connections. I could rescue my mother from Albert. “No!” the panicked voice yelled inside me, and I pushed hard at him. “No!” I shouted aloud.

  “Okay, little girl,” he said, freeing me. “Here’s your fifty dollars.” His smirk looked like disdain, and he peeled two twenties and a ten from a wad. “I’ll drive you back to Andy’s,” he grunted over his shoulder as I followed him, lost, down thickly carpeted stairs I hadn’t seen before.

  I am in danger, I thought on the ride down from the Hollywood Hills. I am on the verge of going out of control. The Silent Film Star looked straight ahead, maneuvered the wheel with both hands, and said nothing, emphatically. He’d dismissed me, left me alone with my thoughts. How puny I felt in the deep black leather seat. A girl alone in the world is a rabbit chased by a pack of hungry coyotes. I cringed at the vision. It was only a matter of time before the rabbit would be caught and torn apart.

  My mother’s hair spiked straight up as though tugged, and she looked as she used to when she screamed “Hirschel.” “Oh, my God, Lilly, my God!” she shrieked at me when I pulled open the screen door. “You’re killing me. Why do you want to punish me like that?”

  “What? What’s wrong? What happened?”

  “I said to Mrs. Frank next door, ‘My daughter is a model for bathing suits.’” My mother sobbed the words. ” ‘Look,’ I said, ‘I’ll show you her beautiful pictures.’ I didn’t know the terrible things you had in that envelope. Naked!” she howled. “I was so ashamed. I can never show my face again to the neighbors.”

  The figure photos. I hadn’t hidden them because I never thought she’d look in my drawers. I slammed the wall with my fist, masking chagrin in outrage. “Does Albert know?”

  “Albert! I have so much shame I want to die. How should I tell Albert?”

  “Don’t tell Rae either!” I shook my mother by the shoulders, a bully’s shake. “Promise,” I snarled at her. I couldn’t bear the thought of my aunt’s screeching and carrying on also.

  “It’s my fault. I didn’t give you a good childhood,” my mother said, weeping noisily. “How can you do it?” she yelled again. “Is that the way a nice Jewish girl behaves?”

  Nice Jewish girl? How am I Jewish? What do I have to be nice about? “Dammit, shut up,” I screamed, and covered my ears to drown her out. “Please please please shut up! I’ll never do it again. Quit crying!” The worse I felt, the louder I screamed. “Dammit, shut up!”

  I wanted to stop. I saw Corinne with the mustachioed guy, the girl in the tight dress with the man in the white suit. Bile bubbled into my mouth. I had to stop before it happened to me. I knew it for sure. The coyotes would get me.

  7. MY MOVIE-ACTRESS NOSE

  ONCE MY MOTHER discovered the pictures, she had a whole new set of fears—her daughter, naked for the world to see, careless and vulnerable, was going astray and was fated to turn out just like her. What a danger, what a woe women were to themselves, if they didn’t keep a rein on their sex and weren’t clever in their dealings with men. Her own life had taught her that lesson at a terrible price: Instead of finding a way to get her family out of the Nazis’ path, she’d let a man and sex distract her from a sacred mission.

  The fact is, there was probably no way she could have succeeded in her mission. She and Rae had been ignorant teenage girls shipped off from the shtetl to America with only each other as guide in a stupefying new world. My mother tried her best. The right man never came along, and what could a woman do about it? She failed in the marriage department, but year after year the alarm clock rang at six-thirty and she was out the door and off to the shop by seven o’clock, no matter how lousy she felt, no matter how rotten Moishe was being. And for as long as mail continued to be delivered in their shtetl, she and Rae sent money orders to Prael from their meager paychecks every month. It was enough money to buy a little more food, an occasional new coat, a pair of shoes maybe, though it wasn’t enough to rescue the family—neither she nor Rae ever made enough. But I think that somehow my mother’s failure to save them must have gotten mixed up in her head with her affair with my father. Those years she was going crazy in our furnished room, she must have believed that the death of her brother and sisters was directly connected to her sexual mistakes. What else could her punishing guilt have been about? And now I, her only child, the last remnant of her slaughtered family, had also shown the signs of sexual foolishness.

  “Terrible things can happen to you from this!” She brought me my coffee in bed and cried again the next morning. “You’ll make a mess from your life. The men will steal the whites from your eyes if you let them. They’ll make you for a living dead one.”

  “All right, all right already,” I muttered.

  “You’ll make yourself cheap like dirt! I haven’t suffered enough? You want to suffer now too?” She wept over my bed when it was barely light the following day. I leapt up and stormed to the bathroom, breathing noisily through clenched teeth, banging the door behind me.

  But maybe she was right not to trust me. Maybe I was weak the way she’d been—an inherited weakness. I didn’t know for sure. I’d almost succumbed to Carlos under the willow tree in Hollenbeck Park—I couldn’t lie to myself about it. Maybe even to Falix Lieber too, there on the dirty floor of Fanny’s furnished room. What would stop me from making the same mistakes she’d made? I’d even been tempted by the Silent Film Star’s proposition in that place with the mirrors and fur bedspread. She’d never forgive herself if I ended up like her. I’d be her final tragedy.

  She was outside the bathroom door, and I could hear her sniffing. “Shut up about it!” I yelled. I perched on the rim of the cold white bathtub and didn’t leave until I heard her steps retreating. Then I made a beeline for my room and slammed the door behind me.

  But I vowed to myself not to upset her anymore. I’d quit modeling. Yet if I quit, how would I get money for the plastic surgery to make my nose Hollywood quality? And if I couldn’t have a nose job, I might as well give up the dream I’d lived with for so long, that she’d planted in me when I was seven years old.

  Actually, she hersel
f gave me tacit permission now to let the dream go. “Lilly, I beg you, be a good girl,” she said, standing in back of me a few days later as I brushed my teeth.

  “Okay. What’s a good girl?” I asked her imploring reflection in the mirror, my toothpaste mouth grinning ironically.

  “Be good in school, like you used to be.”

  Sure, brilliant. I’d flunked almost everything I’d taken in the spring semester.

  “If you’re good in school, you can become somebody. A secretary maybe. A bookkeeper. You won’t have to work in a shop your whole life like me.”

  A secretary! A bookkeeper! So those were her paltry dreams for me now, no better than what Fanny thought I could do. She’d given up on me, on the dreaming we used to do together. I spat the toothpaste loudly into the sink. It was only when I slammed the door of my room yet again and paced the floor in a funk that a startling insight hit me: To her, a secretary or a bookkeeper was a high-class job. “That Americanerin”—she used to tell me about the woman who kept the books at Schneiderman’s—“she makes so much money, and she dresses so beautiful that she’s just as big a snob as the owner’s wife.” Or about Mrs. Frank, who’d been a secretary for Allstate Insurance before she married a salesman, my mother had remarked, “So educated! She graduated school and worked at such a nice job in a office.” It was probably all the same to her—an actress, a bookkeeper, a secretary—any job in which you weren’t imprisoned in a shop the way she’d been was a good job, a great job. She’d told me to be an actress when I was a little kid because I’d been too young to be a secretary or a bookkeeper, and actress was a good job that even a young girl might get. I just hadn’t understood her simple job categories before.

  But it was too late. Understanding couldn’t free me from the yearning for the golden apple that had been my lifelong obsession. I couldn’t settle for “a nice job in a office” because I knew the difference, even if my mother didn’t.

  So I stared at my nose in the mirror every chance I got. If I didn’t have a three-way mirror or a hand mirror to hold up to a larger one, I cocked my head to the right, to the left, shooting my eyes in the opposite direction so I could get a glimpse of my profile. My nose wasn’t getting any smaller. I pinched the bridge into a thinness, I lifted the nub into a ski jump, but it always bounced back to its grotesque shape. There was Pinocchio in the mirror, Jimmy Durante. There was W. C. Fields and Cyrano de Bergerac. “A Roman nose,” I thought, recalling a dumb joke I’d heard at Geller’s about some other poor girl. “Roamin’ all over her face.” I had to have that nose job.

  How much had I managed to save from my months of modeling? I kept my loot in an old black sock in the back of my closet, behind a scatter of shoes. Now I pulled the wrinkled bills out and counted them, six twenties, twelve tens, seven fives. I’d squandered so much, now I didn’t have nearly enough to pay for plastic surgery, which E. J. Smith had said could cost five hundred dollars. If I didn’t go back to Andy’s, it would take me forever to earn the difference as a salesgirl or a file clerk at $1.25 an hour—if I could even get such a job without experience.

  “Why can’t you meet a nice Jewish boy in high school and start to go out?” my aunt kept pestering me, and I’d laugh to myself, thinking of the slob disguises I wore to school. “Sweet sixteen is old enough to find a nice boy,” she said now when I went to her place to fetch some old issues of the Forward for my mother. “You wait too long, you can’t have babies no more. Like me.” My first son I was supposed to call Avrom, after her father. A daughter should be Sarah, after her mother. I’d heard it a million times.

  I stood on one foot, ready to fly out of there and away from her nagging. “I better go. I have a rehearsal.”

  “Wadda you have to go out to rehearsals for and come back late at night, all by yourself? It’s mishugas, craziness. Mrs. Pinsky downstairs from me’s daughter is only seventeen, and she’s already engaged with a beautiful ring.”

  “Well, maybe I could find a nice boy and be engaged with a beautiful ring like Mrs.-Pinsky-downstairs-from-you’s daughter if I weren’t so ugly,” I grumbled.

  “Ugly? What are you talking? You’re so shayn gevacksen, beautifully grown.” She defended me against myself. “But you look too sad all the time. Smile and the boys will like you.”

  Smile and the boys will like me. She hadn’t the tiniest inkling of who I was because she knew nothing about my life: the chicken dance, Falix, the nude modeling, my aching ambition. And what the hell did she know about what boys liked anyway? She couldn’t find a husband until she was in her forties. “I have an ugly nose,” I said. “All the girls at Fairfax High School with noses like mine got them bobbed last year.”

  “Wadda you mean? Bobbed like a hair bob?”

  “Sort of. Plastic surgery.” Now I sat down on her sofa, and she sat down next to me. I could tell she was interested, and if this was my chance, I had to take it. “A doctor can make your nose look small, like a shiksa’s.”

  “It’s not dangerous?” She leaned forward to listen. So I was right—even my aunt thought my nose was ugly.

  “The girls that did it were back in school after about ten days.”

  “Then do it!” my aunt said, ever the practical woman.

  I’d inherited that trait. “It takes a lot of money. Maybe two-fifty, three hundred dollars, but the girls at school told me about a very good doctor. It would make such a big difference in the way I look,” I said. “Maybe with a different nose I’d find a nice boy.”

  I could hear Mr. Bergman rummaging through drawers in the kitchen. My aunt got up—to help him I thought—but she stood at the window with folded arms instead. “I didn’t do good by you from the time you were small,” she sighed. “I meant to do everything right, and nothing worked out.”

  I went to put my guilty arms around her. We stood together, not talking, just looking out the window at nothing, the stucco of the ugly apartment building next door. In my high heels I was practically a head taller than My Rae now. I kissed her hair. She smelled like matzoh ball soup and all the good things she used to cook for me.

  “I should have taken you away to live with me when I married Mr. Bergman. Maybe if you’d had a good home when you were small you wouldn’t look so sad now, but that Mary—she was always a selfish cat. She wouldn’t let me do nothing. A no-good selfish cat!” Rae hissed with all the old fury.

  Their unhappiness with each other, their tirades—through all the years nothing had changed. Yet, despite the vitriol, they were sisters, two limbs on a bare tree. They never talked about the shared root that had been all but blasted, but they couldn’t forget it, and it bound them together, despite curses and thrown shoes and bitter recriminations. Though they were both married now, the men had come too late to matter; even if Albert and Mr. Bergman had been different, they couldn’t have counted for much. The important people in their lives were each other and me.

  “That selfish cat Mary wouldn’t let me do what I wanted for you, but to me it was always first God, then you. What else am I still working for if not to help? I’ll go tomorrow to the bank. I bet you Mrs. Pinsky’s daughter with her small little nose had it fixed too.”

  That was what American girls did these days to get a boyfriend, my aunt must have figured.

  The nose the plastic surgeon gave me wasn’t the Marlene Dietrich nose I’d hoped for, but neither was it the big convex burden I’d been carrying around with me for so long. I called E. J. Smith’s old agency to make an appointment for an interview as soon as the swelling went down and I could get a new publicity picture.

  I’d expected secretaries and a suite of offices, but Mel Kaufman was alone behind a big metal desk. He was portly and pockmarked and gap-toothed, an ugly man surrounded by a wall of framed black-and-white beauties. When I told him on the phone that E. J. had given me his number, he was very friendly and invited me to “drop by when you’re in the neighborhood,” but when I walked through the door, he seemed brusque. “What can I do for you?” he a
sked. I’d brought several monologues to read for him and the photo that I’d just paid a Hollywood portrait studio thirty dollars to take.

  I handed him the photo, and while he glanced at it I eyed the pictures on his wall. Mine still looked nothing like them, I realized with despair. How had I deceived myself so badly? The women all had blond hair and light skin and looked carefree, with big, open smiles. All-American girls, the girls next door, the sweethearts of Sigma Chi. I, Semitic-looking, dark, sad-looking, with plenty to hide—I was their diametrical opposite. Of course, plenty of male actors in Hollywood looked Semitic like me, and from what I could figure out, the producers and directors and agents were mostly Jewish. A lot of them even came from immigrant families as I did. But the pictures on Mel Kaufman’s wall showed me what I should have known already. If you were a woman and hoped to act, you had to look like a lighthearted shiksa unless you were old enough to play Molly Goldberg.

  “A lantsman, huh?” Mel Kaufman said, glancing again at my photo and then at me. He knew instantly—of course he did. I’d told him my name was Lil Foster. I’d gone through my aunt’s hard-earned money and all my own, and still I couldn’t pass.

  I ignored his question as though I didn’t understand it. Maybe if I could just get him to watch me act he’d see the talent I had, even though I didn’t look like the women on his wall. “E. J. Smith thought you might let me read for you,” I began in my low, confident-woman’s voice. “I was the lead in Night Must Fall at Geller Theatre, and the play broke all records for audience attendance over the last five years.”

  “E. J., that old pisher, I hear he runs a stable now. Is that so?”

  A stable? “I didn’t even know he rode,” I declared offhandedly.

  Kaufman threw his head back and laughed as though I’d said something hilarious. “You’re a funny girl, you know that? Look, I was just going out to lunch. Come and have something to eat.” He didn’t stop for an answer before he steered me out the door by my elbow.