Frog

by Stephen Dixon

  “His father kept calling, visiting, sent flowers, jewelry, offered to straighten or cap her and her sisters’ teeth free, took her to the best shows, restaurants and nightclubs, professed his love every way and any time he could, in taxis, on the street, during intermissions and over food, said he’d make an adoring idolizing husband, she said she’d rather have her spouse ignore or even take a swing at her than that, said ‘OK, no down-on-my-knees like a big jerk and painting your toenails: just solid soulmate loving and lionlike lovemaking or some tumultuous unbridled jungle or forest beast,’ she said ‘Please, where do you get these ideas?—not from me,’ said he wanted to have five children by her, girls and boys, and when she said she’d always wanted ten and the major majority of them boys but was definitely not thinking of them from him, said ‘Ten then—I can afford to. You won’t have to lift a finger. The best hospitals and docs and after-they’re-born care. The world? You got it. On a silver platter.’ She said that was an awful figure of speech. That heads belonged on silver platters. Cooked turkeys. Aspic molds. ‘No, you’re nice and bright and I admire what you’ve done with your life. From no-shoes-in-the-summer-to-save-on-the-shoe-leather to sending yourself through dental school while working at the post office ten hours a day and ending up with one of the biggest practices on the Lower East Side as you say, but we can only go so far at being good companions and friends. I know lots of pretty girls. I’ll introduce you.’ ‘Maybe I set my sights too high, but only you.’ Her father wouldn’t let her go to college to get a profession so she got work for little pay as a secretary. ‘You’re beautiful and you’re built well and you’re not as stupid as most girls your age,’ her father said, ‘but your looks won’t last forever and you haven’t got enough upstairs to only get along on your brains after. Marry him. He’s a smart guy and makes everybody laugh. All in all he’s the best of the fifty or so beaus you’ve had. And that he’s crazy for you means you’ll never have to do a stitch of laundering or sewing and looking after your children if you don’t want. You like to read books and go to shows? You’ll have all the time you want now, and stuff you buy from bookshops and not have to get from the library, plus two-month summer vacations in the mountains with your kids. Nannies. The boats these days are packed with them, most just wanting a few dollars a week plus room and board. Clean Irish and German girls who’ll bring up your children like princesses and chairmen of the board, but with an iron fist so they’re not crawling all over you when they’re sick or should be asleep.’ Finally she said yes. ‘I’m not sure why. He wasn’t that bad looking. He had very strong but at the same time delicate hands. He bathed a lot, never smelled. He was humorous and shrewd with money and had a certain animal something that I think as much as any man’s matched mine. Nine years older than I but he thought young and seemed in relative good health and didn’t drink that much. Deeply drawn to him? Everybody knew me. No man was ever good enough, but I have to admit some excited me a lot more. Maybe because nobody pursued me harder, so I just gave up. If that was it, I must have been nuts.’ They got engaged, broke up. He didn’t want her to return the ring but his mother sent his aunt to her house to get it. ‘I knew I could do better. And with someone who wasn’t as fat and bald and hadn’t such a sure-to-ruin-your-life mother. And who still didn’t have this thing about his poor past where he had to wipe his nose with coarse paper towels he took in big chunks from restaurants and public toilets and day after day refolded and used the same brown bag he packed his lunch in till it was practically in shreds. Her father said ‘You marry him or I’m throwing you into the street and never letting you back. I was never this dumb since I was a boy but I already gave his mother half the dowry money and now she’s calling it earnest gelt and won’t give any of it back.’ Engaged again. ‘I’m not sure why. My father and brother and that he came to where I worked and said he still wanted my hand and kept sniffling and drooling till I had to say yes so he’d stop. If I had learned later it was all a ruse, just to get a beautiful woman for a wife and as he said to up the odds that he’d have beautiful children, I would have killed him.’ Before she met him she’d won several beauty contests, almost became Miss America, danced in the Scandals and then the Follies on Broadway and in a few movies. Turned down a dinner invitation from the Prince of Wales. ‘The type I liked least: a rich roué and lush. He was very gracious when Flo introduced us, and I was told he’d singled me out of the line and then got even more excited when he heard I was well read, but his face was already so depraved that just shaking his hand I didn’t know what I’d catch from him. Now I wish I had accepted. Not for any ideas about being the First Wallis Simpson—he wasn’t ready for that for years and it’d be too farfetched to think he’d choose Jewish—but to have had the story.’ Wealthy women and men sent her flowers and expensive presents backstage but she returned all the presents and devised ways not to even bump into them after the show, for she said they were hungry wolves out after just one thing. ‘Who wanted to be another pearl on an already lengthy strand? That’s what my mother told me she used to think when she modeled for Milgrin’s when she was fourteen and every man who came in with his mistress or wife tried to paw her behind. Creeps then, creeps in my time, no doubt creeps now and forever. As for women with women, lots of the other dancers did it and sometimes just for fun they said, but to me nothing could be more repulsive.’ His father sat in the front rows or overhanging front loges of the theater almost every night during the last weeks of her stage dancing which was around when he met her. ‘He came in with his cronies—all of them dentists—and said they waved and winked and occasionally whistled and clapped at me whenever I danced near. It never distracted me since I couldn’t see them because of the footlights. And I was deaf on my left side where they usually sat—their right—from when a grade-school teacher smacked me when I talked back. Oh, I was always a devil. I don’t know what happened to me.’ Her brother-in-law stole their car during the wedding reception. His father had bought it new that week, morning of the wedding parked it in front of the wedding hall, planned to drive it to Atlantic City with her after the reception, then back to Manhattan next day to board a ship for a two-week cruise to Cuba. ‘We had it at the Academy of Music, with their orchestra. My motherin-law wanted Klezmer. That’s what her daughter had at hers and I guess it also brought back her blissful old village life filled with ignorance, beatings and poverty, but my father wouldn’t hear of it. He wanted couples to dance, maybe a tango or turkey trot or two but mostly civil waltzes. To him there was nobody in the world like Emperor Franz Josef. He had a neighbor do a needlepoint of him in parade dress on a horse, which hung in our living room, and wore his Franz Josef mustache and had many of his mannerisms for fifty years. So he said to her “If you insist they be there, have them come without their instruments. Just to drink and eat and dance and throw up in the lavatories,” which they did. He was a great sport with money and minced no words. The Academy was the swankiest place we could have had it at then, not being old-time Yankee Doodle Jews, and it was done completely kosher. That was against my father’s eating tastes and his beliefs and jacked up the price of the reception by more than half, but my motherin-law, who loved pork and brains at our house, wouldn’t come to it if it was any other way. Your father even had to buy his brother a tux for the wedding, and the most expensive there was or he wouldn’t show, plus buy his mother a diamond watch exactly like mine and diamond earrings in place of my engagement ring. They had him under their palm, that family, except for his father who was a sweet schnook.’ Or his uncle got someone to steal the car, but to use it to transport bootleg whiskey. ‘He slipped out of the party and was gone for hours. Nobody missed him since we had more than two hundred people there, with Cantor Rosenblatt, perhaps the finest cantor of his day and still at the top of his voice, singing during the ceremony. It would be like having Jan Peerce and Richard Tucker both during their heyday. They were brothers-in-law, you know, but I forget which one married whose sister. This was all during Prohibitio
n. In fact Uncle Lewis got my father all the liquor for the party—Dad had folded his bar long ago when he couldn’t get liquor legally—but weeks before. My sister was in on that car. Two connivers. She probably said “Go now, I’ll cover for you, it’s the fuchsia one right outside, anybody ask for you I’ll say you ran off with the bride.” She’s OK today, too blind and weak to joke or cheat at anything but getting a second shower at her nursing home, but he never stopped being in the rackets till he died. The Syndicate, then Murder Incorporated. For all we know he carried out the contracts or did the body disposing—one of those, or maybe you graduate. I forget what Brooklyn bay most of those bodies ended up in, but it was famous for a while. New York Jewish boys were very big in that then. My brother Robert used to say half his childhood friends ended up in prison and the other half in law school. Whenever he went to Sing Sing to see a client, ten other men in the halls there would yell out “Hiya, Bobby, remember me from Rivington or Cannon Street or P.S. 62?” Lewis once showed us his gun, trying to impress us—he was a little guy so it made him feel strong. But your father told him Lepke himself was a patient of his and that whenever he treated him he demanded he leave his guns in a locked cabinet just for them in his laboratory. Gurah’s teeth he’d never treat as he heard he stabbed his dentist from the chair once for no other reason but that the novocaine didn’t completely take. They found the car while we were in Cuba. It stunk so such from whiskey that we had to almost give it away. That was pre-vinyl and before fabric treatment, so the cloth just soaked it in. There was even blood on the seats, but probably from one of the bootleggers cutting himself from one of the many broken bottles in it. The homemade Prohibition whiskey was bottled in the cheapest glass. So we took the train to Atlantic City—Lewis and Ellie in front of the Academy throwing rice at us as we left—or borrowed someone’s car. Or someone drove us there that night and we took the train back to the ship the next day. Something about cars and trains sticks in my mind though.’”

  “‘You won’t believe this,’ my mother told me. ‘No one would if I swore on a stack of bibles and had motion pictures with sound on them plus six of the most reputable witnesses. Your father called his mother on our wedding night to say I was a virgin. Right from the hotel room. It must have been 2:00 a.m., or maybe it was seven or eight, so the next day. He thought I was still asleep. He just sat at the edge of the bed, placed the call through the lobby desk and whispered in Yiddish to her “She’s all right, one piece.” Then I heard her say back in Yiddish “Good, for tragedy for you and me and everyone connected with your marriage if she was anything but.” Your father taught me Yiddish just so I could speak to her. I’d taken German in high school and did well at it so I had a head start. Every other day for an hour he sat down with me for conversation in it. First the curses: Gehn bud and so on. Then a few weeks before the marriage he asked me to have my father get me tutors for several hours a day because I wasn’t learning fast enough to be fluent by the time of the wedding. She was an ignorant woman. Let’s face it: a tough shrewd illiterate peasant who loved what she was and never wanted to be anything else. Who wouldn’t even learn our yes or please or thank you. His father, who got out in the world more as a darner and weaver, at least spoke some broken English and apologized for not knowing more. You of course know you’re named after her: Hinda—Howard. It was the last thing I wanted to do, but she died three months before you were born. I always hated to say this, but that was the happiest pregnancy I had. With Vera, which should have been the best since I had nine months free of my motherin-law, your father was already in trouble.’”

  “My mother talking: ‘My mother and motherin-law were sitting at the main wedding table with me. “Let me see the nice jewelry Simon gave you,” my motherin-law said. So I held my hands out to show her the diamond watch and engagement ring, both of which she’d seen ten times before, but never in front of my mother. I say “my mother,” since if my father were at the table at the time she never would have asked it. She knew he’d see right through her immediately and tell her off. Oh, my father was on to her from the start. He was born of peasants but moved himself to the city quickly and became a man of the world. Anyway, all this was in Yiddish, you understand. Not my mother. Besides English she spoke Polish and German, but never in front of us. That they only did when they got into fierce arguments. Then my motherin-law said “Why don’t you take them off so I can really have a look at them?” So I took the ring and watch off and held them out. She took them and turned them over and over and said things like “Very nice, very expensive, my son has very good tastes and knows how to take care of a lady. Listen, my darling,” she said, “let me hold them for you while you’re on your honeymoon. I heard those Spanish islands can be very unsafe places for Americans,” and she started putting them in her bag. Did I let her? You must think I was crazy. She wanted to keep them to see if I was going to be a virgin that night. If your father told her I wasn’t, and he’d never lie to her on anything, she would make him leave me and she’d keep the jewelry. And if she was told I was a virgin, which I was but she never believed him because of my good looks and dancing in all those Broadway shows and with almost nothing on sometimes, she would have kept the jewelry anyway because she would have said he was lying to protect me. So I told her no, if I feel unsafe before we go I’ll let my mother hold them for me. And if I don’t feel unsafe till we’re on the cruise, I’ll leave them in a safe they must have on the ship. That way I kept my jewelry. And when he told her the next morning I was a virgin-called her just for that purpose, right from the hotel lobby phone before we went in for breakfast—she had no reason to argue with him about it. As it was, I had to sell all my good jewelry months after your father went on trial, as the lawyer costs and your father not working had made us almost dead broke. Good thing she was gone by then or she would have died during the trial or when he went to prison. What am I saying?—she’d never let anything hurt herself. She would have just pretended she got some kind of heart attack, and then he would have got very sick over it in prison and perhaps died. Maybe I’m being too hard on her, but for the first ten years of my marriage that woman ruined my life. If ever there was a real witch in this world…. Well, I could tell you stories’”

  “A story his mother liked to tell. ‘Make what you want of this. I suppose it shows what a devil I was. I was playing hooky. First time too, and I walked around the neighborhood, feeling free but not really finding anything interesting to do—I always had to be stimulated—so I walked around my school a few times. Dumb of me when you think of it, but I was probably trying to make some point. I was pigheaded and a tomboy too. So I yelled up to Miss Brody’s window—the assistant principal and a real doll. She’d say “Your principal is your pal; that’s also how to spell it.” I loved her. Always very kind to me. I yelled “Miss Brody, Miss Brody, here I am”—she wasn’t Irish, you know. Brody could be a Jewish name. From a town in Poland where they congregated. They came over here. The immigration official would try to pronounce their names—Dyzik, Pytzik—and say “I can’t say it, how am I supposed to spell it?” So he’d look at their cards which had where they were from and what shots they got and say “Brody, you’re from Brody so your name’s now Brody, a good American one.” You didn’t fight it, if you could in English, since you were afraid of being detained another week or sent back. She was the first Jewish assistant principal in the system, it was said. The public schools were dominated by the Irish then. They probably thought she was one, with that name, but it’s surprising it first went to a woman. Maybe because there were so few Jewish men teachers because the pay was so bad. Worse than anyone’s. But if they didn’t know she was Jewish, then really no surprise, because they probably had about a dozen Irish women assistant principals by then, so what was one more? But I yelled “You can’t see me, Miss Brody, but I can see you.” I couldn’t, but that’s what I kept yelling to get her attention. “I’m playing hooky, Miss Brody, what do you think of that? I’m not going to school toda
y or any other day, or if I do, only for a day a week and only the day I want.” I’m telling you, I was something. She finally came to the window and said “You come straight upstairs, dear, or you’ll be in deep trouble, I hate to say.” I said something like “Why should I? I’m having too much fun walking around free as a bird.” Just then she said “Watch out, dear, someone’s coming,” and slammed the window. Everyone knew my father and was afraid of him. He was out for his daily hour stroll from his café. Cane he didn’t need, for show, always the freshly blocked homburg. I thought it was the truant officer she meant and started to run. But he had already come up behind me and put the hook part of the cane around my neck, grabbed me by the scruff of it and marched me into the school right up to Miss Brody’s office. Then he threw me on the floor there and said “You’re too easy on her. She yells like that from the street at you or stays out of school without our permission, this is what you do,” and he lifted me up by my hair and slapped me hard on my left ear. Oh, I heard ringing and buzzing, besides all the pain, and when the noises stopped I heard him saying “And maybe even harder to her, maybe much harder. She’ll learn, and her parents will only thank you if you smack her like that. That’s a promise.” I was deaf in that ear for weeks, but he wouldn’t let my mother take me to a doctor for it. I still only have about ten to twenty percent of my hearing there. Maybe it was because of his slap. But maybe it was bad before that and his slap made it worse. I don’t want to apologize for him but I do want to be fair. Or maybe it was always that bad, from birth, or even before, and we only became aware of it after he slapped me and I started complaining I couldn’t hear in that ear, to take some of the blame of playing hooky off me. And then who knows? Maybe I was a hundred percent deaf in that ear before he hit me and his hitting me improved it by ten to twenty percent, but still made us realize my hearing problem. I don’t remember any hearing problems before, but that’s not saying there wasn’t. Probably not. But Miss Brody. She was a lovely person. The first to urge me to be a doctor or lawyer or something substantial. But she never so much as touched me after that when before she used to hug me whenever she saw me in the halls or so. And other times shove or nudge me gently when she thought I wasn’t doing things just right when she knew I had it in me to.’”