Frog

by Stephen Dixon

  “As a boy I loved looking at the albums and manila envelopes of photos from when my mother was a showgirl and beauty contest winner. None of the bathing beauty photos show her with a ribbon across her chest saying what Miss she was. ‘Because of my dad I only kept the ones that had nothing like that on them. Ones he might find, let him think I was girlishly posing for a boyfriend or a roving photographer on a boardwalk or beach.’ ‘But it was in the papers, wasn’t it?’ I said. ‘Good point; I didn’t think of that then. No, now I remember. It was in them but nowhere near as much then, and he only read the Yiddish and Polish dailies, which had nothing about it.’ ‘Then his customers could have told him.’ ‘That’s true. If they did, he never said. My feeling is none ever said anything because they knew he’d get so mad they’d be banned from his bar for life.’ She said she was Miss New York. Her sister Rose said it was Miss Coney Island. ‘I was her chaperon at it—Mama wouldn’t let her go otherwise—so I remember.’ ‘Then how’d she get to the Miss America contest?’ I said. ‘She became Miss Brooklyn or something—Coney Island being in that borough—but that part I know less of. It was your Aunt Bitty who chaperoned her to that one, though she wasn’t your aunt then because you weren’t alive yet, and she died a few years after that.’ My father said that whatever Miss my mother said she was is true. ‘She’s got a memory like a machine that never stops. And all that was a little before I met her. Only thing my mother and I were interested in was that she came to me a whole woman. You think that’s funny—go on, laugh, wise guy—but it should still be important to you, if you were smart. Of course, if she hadn’t been what we thought she was, I wouldn’t have tossed her back, though I might have asked her father for a larger dowry.’ ‘You would have told him?’ ‘Probably not, since he was already very generous. Gave me a gold watch, a big wedding—Cantor Rosenblatt sang, considered the best cantor in the world then—plus some cash to start the apartment with. I probably would have just lied to my mother and then done a lot of davening in shul because of it.’ ‘Because of what—lying to your mother, or the other?’ ‘What are you, a cop? Because of everything and nothing, you satisfied?’” Doesn’t work. Concentrate.

  “His mother was almost Miss America. First or second runner-up—she was never sure, she said, even when it happened. One photo he especially liked of her then had her in a one-piece bathing suit, barefoot, holding a ball over her head. A beauty. He should borrow it to show his daughters, or just pull it out of the breakfront drawer next time they’re there. ‘This is Grandma can you believe it? When she was younger than your mother is now by almost twenty years, and thirty years younger than I.’ Short black hair, big dark eyes, radiant smile—” Not radiant. Beaming smile, bouncy smile, just a big beautiful mesmerizing smile. Checks the thesaurus. “Short dark hair, big black eyes, bright smile, brainy face, bathing beauty figure—for then. She was curvy but slim, with small breasts. ‘I wouldn’t win with those breasts today,’ she said. ‘But they were good enough to nurse four normal-sized babies and each for more than a year. Doing it so long probably kept you kids from getting fat like your father in later age, if you have his genes for that.’ Long perfect legs. Near perfect. Almost perfect. Athletic. ‘The woman who became Miss America—’”

  “My mother was first runner-up in the Miss America pageant of 1922 or ‘23. Maybe even ‘24, since she later danced on the stage for two years till her father pulled her off it, got engaged to my father soon after, married in ‘27 and had my oldest brother at the end of that year. Or was he born in ‘28? He’s eight or nine years older than I almost to the day. ‘The woman who won the contest,’ she said, ‘was a Miss Sunshine. That was her last name. We all called her Sunny, though she was a real bitch. I don’t remember her first name or what state she was from. Pennsylvania, I think. Ohio. She looked typically Polish and most of the Poles came from Pennsylvania and Ohio then. She was a striking bleached blonde with that little upturned nose the real Poles have—much more so than mine, and squinched. I would have won the title—everyone said so—if they had counted talent and intelligence as qualifications then. Sunny couldn’t do anything but smile brightly and strut her behind, which were really no better than mine. While I danced, sang, knew something about manipulating marionettes, and played Bach and popular music on the violin. I also had graduated a good public high school with an academic diploma and very near the top of my class, and I don’t think Sunny or very many of the other contestants ever got past primary school.’ George White was one of the judges and all the runners-up were invited to dance in his Scandals that year. This famous woman mimic was a shikker. This famous male singer slept with boys. This one had twenty stray mutts in his dressing room and once a month one would be found dead in the alley outside. Several of the dancers ended up living off sugar daddies and one she especially got friendly with married a cattle baron in Argentina who beat her to death. ‘I avoided the stage-door Johnnies like the plague. Mr. White knew I was repulsed by them and gave me special permission to leave through the lobby.’ She was one of the six women to introduce the Charleston and one of the twelve to introduce the black bottom, ‘or maybe it was the other way. I know that for one of those dances six girls were on one side of the stage and six on the other. Some of the outfits we had to wear barely covered our bosoms and pubic areas. But I made sure, with skillful pinning or these pink beads I glued on, that my nipples were never exposed, though they were awfully painful to take off.’ She danced in two or three movies made in a studio in Long Island City. The Song and Dance Man one was called, ‘though it was also known as The George White Scandal Movie—maybe that was its title.’ Helen Morgan and Don Petricola were in it, she thinks. ‘There still wasn’t sound yet, but when I saw it I seem to remember songs sung and shoes tapping and brief applause. What I remember most is the work I put into it, after spending nine hours at the hospital every day, and the rotten pay.’”

  “His mother, after graduating high school, got a job as a medical secretary in the x-ray department at Bellevue. ‘I worked personally for Dr. Katzburger, perhaps the foremost roentgenologist of his day. He wrote books and books on it and the governor and high officials of different states and presidents of countries and wealthy and important people like that came to him. I wanted to be a doctor and thought my father, who was totally against it, would change his mind when he saw how well I did at the hospital and was told by professionals there like Dr. Katzburger what a fine doctor I’d make. But he always said “Marry one, don’t become one, and you’re in the perfect place to meet one. It’ll be cheaper and faster, you won’t have to work so hard studying and later practicing, and you’ll wind up getting just as good medical treatment being married to a doctor as being one, and what would you do with your practice once your babies start to come?”’”

  “His mother’s mother was a saint. Mine was. My mother’s mother was a saint. The whole Lower East Side thought so, my mother said, ‘or let me say “the Jewish part of it.” Crowded as our apartment was, with nine surviving children, two live-in Polish maids, my parents and an uncle who always lived with us but wasn’t really my uncle but my father’s boyhood friend from Dembitzer near Lemburg. Bei Lemburg, in German. Or maybe that’s where your dad’s folks came from and mine were from Christapolia bu Schmetz. I don’t know what the “bu” means, even if I was very good in German in school. Maybe it’s Polish. But really, we slept two and three to a bed then, though Uncle Leibush always had his own room. Still, she put total strangers up if she heard they had no place to sleep. And for days to weeks, whole families of landsmen who just came over on the boat with no place to stay, and on holidays she often took poor people off the street to feed, no matter what their origins or religion. Stern as my dad was about most things, he never said boo to this. Maybe because we had all kinds of food cooking nonstop anyway, what with the needs of his bar right downstairs, and the guests never slept anywhere but in the hallway on the floor.’ Photos of her mother were always on her dresser. Same with my father’s
parents on his. She had blue hair in them—‘Gray turned blue because of some photographic tinting process,’ my mother said. And a big gawdy broach she said had been painted on the photos by the photographer because he thought she looked too plain. ‘She had her hair dyed blue for thirty years,’ my Aunt Rose said. ‘Then it wouldn’t go back to its natural color when she wanted it to, which by that time she couldn’t find out what it was. The broach was my father’s wedding gift, but was missing from her jewelry box after she died. We think my sister Bertha took it when the rest of us were in the funeral home. It was worth thousands even then.’ My mother’s mother worked full-time in her uncle’s bakery as a little girl, became a model for Milgrin’s when she was thirteen, ‘which even that time,’ my mother said, ‘was one of the fanciest women’s stores though not on Fifty-seventh yet,’ married at fifteen and had a dozen children, three dying before they were five. ‘Nine out of twelve was considered a pretty good ratio then, even for someone with a little money and local influence like my dad. So besides being generous to a fault, perhaps, she was also a great beauty—’”

  “His grandmother worked as a fashion model for a fancy New York women’s store when she was fourteen. She told them she was older. His mother apparently inherited these looks, or maybe she got them from her father who was quite handsome, for she became a beauty contest winner and then a dancer in the Ziegfield Follies. ‘I was strictly a dancer, I want you to know—not a showgirl. They had to prance around stark naked at times, while we had enough covering our pubic area where we didn’t have to keep it shaved as they did. We also had at least one breast unexposed, if maybe just the nipple part of it with a single black or red or violet bead, depending on the costume color. My nipples were sore because of it for the two full years I was in the show. Your father, once he met me, went to it practically every night. He got front-or second-row seats and a lot of those times he went with his friends—The Filthy Four they were known on the lower East Side as, because of their carousing and womanizing and so forth. He kept doing one terrible thing to me then. He’d wink and wave at me to get my attention whenever I danced on his side of the audience. I got Flo—Mr. Ziegfield—to let me dance as much as possible on the other side of the stage whenever I saw your father there.’ ‘What happened when he sat in the center, if he ever did?’ ‘Then I’d keep my regular position and take the abuse. The other girls adjusted to my position switches easily, since we were a great crew, always looking out for one another, which we had to, for the men thought we were all whores. After the show he’d wait for me with the other stage-door Johnnies, but I avoided them like the plague. I got Mr. Flo—he knew I came from a strict family and was a good girl—to give me special permission to leave through the lobby.’ ‘So when did you really start going with Dad? Or why did you even continue to see him if he acted this way?’ ‘You should ask first how we met. It’s a good story, full of intrigues and laughs. Not romantic, though. Your father was never like that unless he was terribly guilty about something that he had no intention of telling me what. Then he’d just hand them to me—flowers, but a real big bouquet—and turn around and go straight to the dinner table or wash up.’”

  “My folks met this way. My father’s aunt had a photo of my mother on her mantel. She was in a bathing suit and high-heeled shoes and holding a parasol. The aunt had cut it out of a newspaper, framed it, and when anyone asked who the woman was she said she had it there to show that a beautiful girl with a terrific figure and what was obviously a sparkling personality and great intelligence on her face, could also be Jewish. My father saw it and said he’d love to meet a woman like that, and she told him a neighbor who saw the picture said the girl’s father owned a bar and grill on the corner of Delancey and Essex and that when business was really booming the girl worked as the cashier.”

  “My father’s aunt had a photo of him on her mantel. He was on a horse, wore jodhpurs, dark shirt and tie, and held up a riding switch. A cousin of my mother’s mother, delivering a dress she made for my father’s aunt, asked who the man was and if he was single. There was an eligible young woman in her family and maybe a meeting could be arranged. If it ended in marriage, did she think the young man’s father would pay her a matchmaker’s fee? ‘He’s to give you for his boy? It’s the girl’s father who’s supposed to give.’ ‘But this girl is something out of the ordinary. She’s already a great beauty, and her face hasn’t even fully formed yet. She’s built like a Broadway showgirl, and in fact is one, but only as a lark—she’s thinking of becoming a doctor or something in science or law. And she has the intelligence of a genius and personality and liveliness that make you adore her in a flash, besides coming from such fine people that her father spends two months every summer in the most expensive German spas, but only to rest from his investments and business.’ ‘My nephew is also considered to be a good-looker, as this photo shows, though losing his hair and maybe getting too big a pot too early. He’s also the perfect brother and son, giving them anything they want, and is already a dentist with one of the best practices on the Lower East Side.’ ‘If he’s that good a catch and something works out between them, perhaps the girl’s father will want to give a matchmaker’s fee and we’ll split it, but without anybody knowing we did.’”

  “My father rammed into my mother’s brother’s parked car outside the Masonic meeting hall they were both going to. He went into the hall, waited till the speaker finished, went to the podium, clinked on a water glass to get the audience’s attention and announced he’d banged into such and such car outside and wanted its owner to know he was ready to take care of all the damages and related expenses and even to drive the owner home, since that’s how bad a condition the car was in. My mother’s brother was so impressed by this, and also the commanding way my father had gone to the podium and spoken and joked in front of so many people, that during the drive home he said he wanted my father to meet his sister.”

  “My father saw a beauty contest picture of my mother in a newspaper, said to himself ‘That’s the girl for me, and if I’ve got as much to offer as people tell me, no reason not to shoot for the best,’ thought her last name was familiar, asked around about her, found out who her father was and where she lived and worked. She was a medical secretary in the X-ray department of a big New York hospital. He went there, asked for her, said ‘Listen, miss, I could’ve done this through a friend—Benny Gernhart, the prizefighter, who says he grew up with you on Rivington and not a nicer girl did he ever know—but I decided to come here myself and say that I fell off my seat when I saw your news picture, am already falling off my feet talking to you for a minute, and if you’ll do me the pleasure of coming out to dinner with me any one of these nights, but preferably this one, I’d be extremely honored, and that’s no bull, excuse me,’ and from behind his back he produced a bouquet of flowers, gave it to her, kissed her other hand, said ‘That’s something I’ve never done before, so it must show something, even to me, how I feel about you,’ said he’d phone in an hour to see what her decision was, and left.”

  “My father saw a photo of my mother in a newspaper. She was in a sedate suit and hat, legs crossed, sea and beach behind her. The article said she was the first Jewish girl to win an important New York beauty contest—perhaps the first American Jewess ever to win such a contest—was from the lower East Side, lived with her family, was one of a dozen children, worked as an X-ray technician in a large New York hospital and hoped to win the Miss America contest ‘less for myself than for the City.’ ‘I can’t say how beautiful I am—that’s for others to judge. But if performing talent is a consideration in the contest, I might have a chance.’ He thought ‘That’s the girl for me if there ever was one,’ asked around about her, no one knew who she was, called the X-ray departments of several New York hospitals, one person who answered said he’d get her to the phone. She got on, he said ‘Hello, Miss Cole?,’ then got cold feet, as he put it, and hung up. Later he said to himself ‘Listen, if I’ve got as much to offer a
s a lot of people have told me—shrewd mind, decent looks, a good nature, a great practice—no reason why she shouldn’t be interested, but not over the phone. I don’t speak well over it and my voice comes out sounding too rough. I’m better at face-to-face meetings.’ Next day he went to the hospital’s X-ray department and was told it was her day off. He went back the next day and said ‘Listen, Miss Cole, I hear you’re a great X-ray technician—tops in the city, a good friend said. Benny Genhart, he’s a ranking lightweight and I think had his hand photographed by you after his last fight.’ ‘It had to be x-rayed by someone else, since that’s not my job.’ ‘Then maybe he only thought you were a great technician or even the doctor by the way you handled things, but he said you’re the person to see. For I’ve got a foot bone I think’s broke and since I’m a dentist who’s on his feet all day—my office is in the same neighborhood you’re from, Benny said.’ ‘I don’t know this Benny you’re speaking of.’ ‘Then maybe he only said he knows someone who knows you or what you do here, but I’m on Clinton, not far from where I think he said you live.’ ‘If your foot is broken or needs an X ray you should see a doctor about it first. Just as someone with a bad tooth would go to you first before thinking of having it x-rayed. Though you do your own x-raying, so the comparison doesn’t apply.’ ‘Look-it, why should I lie? Why start off on the wrong foot with you—and not the broken one—and I don’t even have a broken one or even a bad one? How’s that for not lying? So I’ll start off right. No feet. I saw your newspaper photo last week, went jitters over it, kept it under my pillow for several days—OK. That’s a fib too. I just folded it up and stuck it in my jacket pocket here. It says you live on the Lower East Side, which is where I’m from and now have my dental practice. I showed the photo to some friends—I do know Benny Genhart. We went to grammar school together and I fix his teeth for free. He always needs plenty of work on them too, in his line, but he wasn’t one of the ones I spoke to about you. I asked if anyone knew you or how I could arrange to personally meet you. This is the truth now, but cut my tongue out for the harm it’s going to do me with you for admitting it, and someone—Tommy Rosenblatt. No, no Tommy anything. No such name. Another fib. I just checked around. Called to different hospitals’ X-ray departments, is about it, and this one said you worked here. So I came over yesterday—maybe you heard. Came back today, obviously, and, to sum it up, I’m not at all disappointed in what I’m finding and I’d like very much to go out with you. This afternoon for lunch, even, which I’ll cancel all my appointments for, or anytime you like.’ She said ‘I don’t go out with strangers, especially ones who learned of me through a news article, and now I’ve got to return to work, so goodbye.’ He followed her down a hall, saying ‘Look-it, I know my approach was all wrong with you…. It’s not my usual way … I’m usually so quiet and polite…. Well, that’s not entirely the case…. But I was just so taken with you and now I want to do anything I can to make things right again, OK?’ She said ‘First of all, not that this is any of your business, but I’ve been seeing someone quite exclusively for the last few months. And secondly, do I have to ask the resident on this floor to get you to stop following me?’ He said he was sorry for disturbing her, even sorrier to hear there was already a man in her life, bowed and left. He wrote her several apologies that week. She didn’t answer. He phoned her at work and home and when he told her who it was she hung up. One time he gave a fake name to her mother who answered, and when she got on the phone and found out it was he, she hung up. He sent her flowers at work every day for a week. She sent a note to his office thanking him for the flowers and saying they cheered up a lot of patients in the men’s and women’s wards where she had taken them without ever unwrapping them, but would he now please not send any more? She couldn’t go out with him, she didn’t see any reason why there should ever be further contact between them, but if he persists then the next people she speaks to about him will be the police. He went to her father’s café for dinner every weekday night for a week, hoping to catch a glimpse of her. If he did and she saw him, and he’d try to make sure she did, he’d stand up, bow, pay the check—if she was the cashier and he’d managed to avoid looking at her till the end of the meal, he’d just bow and put the money on the table—and leave. He thought this might do something to make her a little curious about him. She came in the last night he thought he’d go there. The moment she saw him, and before he could stand up, she turned around, went over to her father, still with her back to him pointed in his direction and said something angrily, and left. Her father and several waiters gave him dirty looks for the rest of the dinner but never spoke to him about it and her father went into the kitchen when he got up to pay and leave. He wrote her a letter next day apologizing for his actions the past weeks, said they wouldn’t be repeated and offered to give free dental checkups and treatments to her and her family for as long as they liked. He didn’t hear from her, didn’t expect to, and started seeing other women. About a year later he parked his car the same time her brother parked his in front of the men’s social club they were both going to. Her brother’s license plate had MD on it, his had DDS, as they went into the club they talked about where their offices were and what kind of practices they had and later exchanged cards in case the patients of one might need the services of the other. My father asked if he was related to what must be a former Miss New York by now. The brother said the title wasn’t anything the family was proud of and his father still didn’t know and would probably throw her out of the house if he did. Worse, she was now dancing almost nude in the Scandals, which if his father knew he’d drag her by her hair off the stage he wouldn’t care in front of how many people. The brother had tried talking her out of it. Then tried keeping her from making some performances by locking her in the bedroom and bathroom. But she got out through the fire escape once and the other times banged the door so hard—their father worked in his bar and cafe downstairs and they were afraid he might hear—that their mother told him to let her go. My father told him what a fool he’d made of himself with her a year ago. The brother recalled it, was sure she never thought of it anymore, said she’d dropped the boyfriend she was so serious with then. They became friends—‘Because I liked him,’ my father said, ‘not to get to her; that I gave up on forever.’ The brother told her about him, said what a likable clever fellow he was, that he had a big booming practice, how ashamed he was of the way he’d acted toward her then, and advised her to go out with him if he asked, though he hadn’t mentioned her name or even alluded to her since that first time at the club. She said ‘Keep it that way. Don’t so much as suggest he contact me. For certain never invite him home.’ My father introduced the brother to a woman friend and they got engaged in a few months. My father was invited to the wedding. My mother said she wouldn’t go. But this was her favorite brother, the one she always looked up to. ‘People used to think,’ she’s said to me, ‘that we were girlfriend and boyfriend, we went to so many places together and were so close.’ My father nodded to her when she came down the aisle as one of the bridesmaids. ‘I ignored it.’ He asked her to dance at the reception. ‘I knew he would and had rehearsed what I’d say: a definitive and perhaps also a vociferous no. But I was sitting at the wedding table, everyone was laughing and very happy and I didn’t want to dampen things in any way, so I accepted. As I walked to the dance floor with him I told myself I’d let him know how I felt regarding any other dances or conversation or nodding of heads between us. But I’d also had a bit of champagne by that time and I wasn’t used to it. I rarely touched alcohol till I was around forty, when your father got into trouble. So maybe I was a little tipsy, but I don’t think that’s what made me change my mind about him so quickly. He danced very well and I had always loved to dance. His hands were very soft. They were always that way till he gave up dentistry. That came from the many washings of them with a special pink soap solution before he treated each patient. I don’t think he ever used any other. After he died I gave the last thr
ee gallons of it to a relief agency that was collecting old dental equipment for hospitals in Africa. He smelled nice too and his cheeks were very smooth. From a barber-shaving, I guess, but I never asked him, or if I did, I forgot what he said. He also looked very handsome in a tuxedo. His hair was cut perfectly, what he had of it. His skin was tanned from a weekend in Lakewood the previous week when he did nothing but ride horses and swim and sun. He was also extremely polite. Not at all pushy and brash as he was in the hospital and from that time on. Everyone there seemed to like him. ‘Hi, Simon, Hiya, Doc,’ other couples on the floor kept saying, and several people slapped his back as we danced past. We went to the bar for more champagne after our second or third dance and I could see right away, just in how he joked with the bartender and the people around us, that he got along with everyone and would be lots of fun. Maybe that was just the professional pose he’d developed—making the patient feel comfortable under stressful conditions and also to get new patients. But it was still nice, that night, to be with so popular a guy. Also what I liked, which came from what he said and Uncle Leonard had told me about him, was that he was a wonderful brother and son: generous and attentive. And someone, like me, who wanted a half-dozen children at least, so it turned out there were things and thoughts we had in common. After—during our first date, when he was wearing normal clothes again and maybe hadn’t just come from the barber’s. Even before that, when I opened the door of our apartment to let him in that first time—he seemed much too fat and bald and plain looking for me. And the thought of seeing a man who has his hands in people’s mouths all day was a little sickening, but I got over that after he told me how often he washed them. But there was still something powerful and warm about him that first night. Though we never had any experiences together before we got married, I always had the feeling he was a real man. Also, my brother getting married must have contributed to my change of mind that wedding night and for my quickly changing it again on our first date. So you can say it was a number of things that did it. Even that he had a flashy new car. He and Uncle Leonard were two of the few men on the Lower East Side to have one then. No, I’ve got it wrong. I’m talking of around 1917, when your father became a dentist and said he bought his first car.’”