“They tied a hangman’s noose,” the rabbi said, fingering that noose in his napkin.
“Had Mr. Frank step up on a table. Threw a rope over the branch of a tree. An oak. Kicked the table away, and his head fell backward. He broke his neck.”
None of us had touched our coffee. The air was sharp with chicory and dread. I palmed a sugar cube.
The rabbi nodded. “Not long after, those men, those Knights of Mary Phagan, who had been quiet for years, resurrected the Klan on top of Stone Mountain. Not twenty miles from here. In their white robes, they burned a cross fifty feet tall to celebrate the lynching of Leo Frank.”
“We were up there,” I said, something unpleasant bubbling up my throat. “We were just there—for a wedding. Did you know about Leo Frank?” I asked Mother. “Did you know?”
“I knew,” she said, scribbling notes, her voice shaky. “Not everything, but I knew.”
“Here’s what I think is the worst part,” the rabbi said.
Max put his hand next to mine for a second, then seemed to think better of it.
The rabbi reached into the front pocket of his shirt and pulled out a faded postcard. “People sold souvenirs.”
That was the worst thing? Wasn’t death the worst thing?
Mother picked up the postcard, then put the card on the table, facedown, so it was a blank, so it could be anything.
I turned the card over and shut my eyes nearly all the way. Through my squint, I saw a nightshirt and thin legs off the ground. Birdie’s meatloaf rolled around my stomach.
“Now, the Frank tragedy is especially close because he was a member of our congregation,” the rabbi said quietly. “He sat in our sanctuary.” I imagined the light in the temple, the gold ark, the frosting flowers on the ceiling. “But all throughout Georgia,” the rabbi continued, “from before Leo to after, six hundred Negro men were lynched. Some so close by, on roads we drive every day. Some castrated or set afire—then lynched.”
I hadn’t said anything in minutes. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” I said again.
The rabbi stood up. “The long shadow of Leo Frank leads us here, to helping with civil rights. We have much more work to do.”
“What can we do now?” Mother flipped to an empty page in her steno book. She was ready to make a list.
“I’ve kept y’all too late for a school night,” the rabbi said. “This will be the topic of my sermon for the High Holidays, but in the meantime, let’s start with something simple,” he said to Max and to me. “Every time you’re thirsty, take a drink out of the colored persons’ water fountain.”
I thought: Birdie does that every day, and it’s not a choice.
Nattie put herself to bed while Mother and I cleaned up—me washing, her drying, same as always.
I flipped on Dad’s transistor radio. “Wake Up Little Susie” kept us company.
“You know, I’ve been letting you figure things out here,” Mother said, elbowing me and shutting off the hot tap. “But it’s time we talk, the two of us, no bullshit.”
I’d only heard Mother swear once, when Dad dropped the Thanksgiving turkey on the floor and proceeded to pick it up with two spatulas only to drop it again.
“I thought we would talk when you went to pre-debutante training. Then I thought we’d talk when you went to a Christian school where, God knows, you must pray every day. Then I thought we’d talk when we went to temple.” Mother got up, rooted around her bag, and lit a cigarette.
A throbbing started over my left eye. “Davis taught me how to blow smoke rings.”
She stubbed out her cig, her disapproval implicit.
“Forget Davis and his smoke rings,” Mother said. “I have a question.” I almost expected her to grab her notebook to jot down my vowel-less answer. “How many people have asked if you’re Jewish?”
“Not one. It’s not like I’ve lied.” The whole night—the rabbi, the napkin noose, the lack of Dad, all of it—sat there, between us. I added, almost apologetically, “I’m going to the Fall Ball with Davis Jefferson.”
“The boy with the balloon?”
“You said I could make a trade—temple time for deb time.”
Mother switched off the radio. “Sit down, Ruthie.”
I sat in Dad’s place, letting the plastic stick to my legs.
“You’re passing—you’re trying to pass,” Mother said.
“Pass what?” I asked, eyeing the salt and pepper. Just last night, Nattie informed me, courtesy of the pink booklet, one should pass the salt and pepper together, as a pair.
“Don’t bend who you are to fit with the pre-deb girls or this boy with the balloon.”
Frooshka started barking her head off at something outside.
“Froo,” we both yelled.
It gave me time to figure out what I wanted to say. “You think I shouldn’t bend? You brought us here. You moved us in with your parents. You sent us to Covenant.” I caught my breath galloping right out of my chest. “What do you expect me to do now? Bring a menorah to homeroom? It’s never going to happen.”
“Ruthie, I did what’s best for us.” She puffed her cheeks out, full of air, and then oofed all her breath out. “Everything is hard here. Everything is blue. Nattie, with all her bubbling underwater, knows this better than we do, I think.”
“It doesn’t feel that way at all.” Dad—definitely blue. The lynching of Leo Frank—blue. But the mixer, Davis, Gracie and her sweet tea and sweet dresses and sucre talk—not blue, not blue, not blue.
Mother reached across the table to me. “To lose a husband—so young! So young there was no plan to think about losing him. To lose the father of your children. To lose—for all of us to lose—the city we call home. And to arrive here to the hatred of segregation.”
“There was hate in New York, too,” I said. “Mr. Hank reminded me of that.”
“Not like this.” Mother lit a cigarette again. The ash grew and grew before she took a drag. And then she surprised me with her throaty laugh. “And you’re right, too. Not everything is blue. The only light in the sky can’t be from the cross burnings—it can’t.”
I knew we couldn’t see Stone Mountain from here, but I checked out the window anyway in case the sky was orange. It wasn’t.
Mother turned off the fluorescent overhead. The glow of her cigarette made the room half-light/half-dark, both things at the same time. And that in-between-ness made the distance—between her and me, Dad and not-Dad, Manhattan and Atlanta—as fleeting as a flick of ash.
12
VistaVision
I had Sara on the phone, assessing wardrobe options. “There’s the red-and-white rose dress, but those’re school colors. I don’t want to look too rah-rah.” I kept my voice low. The phone sat on the built-in shelf in the little foyer, open season for eavesdroppers. Mother would be ticked I was talking about fashion and boys; one or the other was bad enough, but both together would confirm my superficiality.
“Believe me, it doesn’t matter if you wear red or purple or poo brown.” Sara exhaled, and I wondered if she was smoking a ciggie, which she’d promised Dad she would stop. “Keep David waiting. Seven minutes is my rule. If you come out too soon, he’ll think you’re easy.”
“Not David. Davis.”
After the briefest pause, she added, “You could go to a movie by yourself, you know. I hope you have a good time, but you don’t need a boy to have fun.”
I could hear the distance pulse through the receiver, a reminder that Sara was there and I was here, and vice versa.
“I’ve been having fun,” I said, in a tone I feared had taken on a shade of Mother’s blue.
“Really?” Sara exhaled long and slow. Between Nattie’s inhaling and Sara’s exhaling, I couldn’t get away from audible breathing.
I corkscrewed the phone cord around my fing
er. “Fontaine had me try on Mother’s Magnolia gown. Did you know she was queen of everything here?”
Sara was quiet for a second. “She was a queen in New York, too. The library committee and the poetry readings. And the temple stuff. She just didn’t have a crown.”
“Are you trying to tell me I’m shallow?”
She laughed. “You are shallow! But you can be shallow and deep at the same time. Water is water.”
“What does that mean, water is water?”
“Is that a Gertrude Stein poem?” Sara asked herself. Oh, please. She and Max were pretentious peas in a pod. “Nope, don’t think so. I mean, even if you’re in the shallow end, you’re in the pool. Not the literal pool. Well, the literal pool, but also the pool of—”
I heard the click-click of Mother’s heels from the kitchen. “Gotta go!” I whispered.
“Wait! Don’t let him feel you up yet!”
The receiver was innocently cradled in its base by the time Mother walked in. She tilted her head. “Are you on the telephone?”
“No.” I wasn’t currently.
Mother followed me to our room and sat, legs akimbo, wearing one of her many pairs of black capris, while I changed into a dress with a pale-blue peplum. “Tell me about this boy.” I think she said this without judgment, but it was Mother, so I couldn’t be sure.
“He’s—” I wanted to say what was true. That he was handsome. That he didn’t torpedo his tongue around when he’d kissed me amid the topiaries. That he had an impressive knowledge of plant life. That he and his vines had wound their way into my dreams, in English and French. I settled on, “He’s smart.” That was definitely a way to get in Mother’s good graces. “He’ll probably design some feat of engineering one day—maybe a bridge.” I had no idea if this was in the realm of possible, but his brother was at Georgia Tech, so it might well be. I had no idea if he even liked his brother. In the last few weeks, ever since Oren had started regularly attending Covenant games, Davis had stopped going altogether.
Mother fluffed up my hair with both her hands.
“Don’t touch!” I’d just finished pressing the ironing wand over sections of my hair to singe the wave right out of it, à la Mademoiselle.
“I love these curls,” she said. “I can’t abide the thought of you taming them for a boy, no matter how smart you say he is. Anyway, I care more about your erudition than his.”
“I’m not doing it for him. I’m doing it for fashion.”
“Ruthie,” Mother started. But I was saved by the Dixie doorbell.
Mother answered while I tried to fasten pearls around my neck. Fontaine had said she’d buy me real pearls for my birthday—her motto, as she’d announced on more than one occasion, was “no pearls, no power”—but in the meantime, Nattie had cut fake ones off a vaguely Victorian doll she’d found in Mother’s old room. They didn’t quite fit around my neck, so I looped them twice around my wrist.
“Go talk to him,” I told Nattie, who’d had her nose in the pink booklet this whole time. “I have to wait seven minutes.”
“Why? There’s nothing about that in here,” she said, waving the book around.
“Sara said so.”
“Remember page thirty-seven when you’re at the movies,” Nattie said.
“Thirty-seven?”
“ ‘Beware the derriere’! Don’t scoot down a row with your backside in people’s faces.”
“Am I supposed to put my face in people’s faces?”
“Maybe,” Nattie said, already in the hallway.
I stood in the doorway and listened to Davis come in. I couldn’t see, but I could hear just fine.
“These are for you, ma’am. Momma cut them from the garden.”
“How lovely,” Mother said in her cocktail-party voice.
“And I’m sorry to hear about your . . . about Mr. Robb.”
“Let me find a vase . . .” Mother’s voice trailed off.
“Do you know about Leo Frank?” Nattie asked.
“What?” Davis said. “Who?”
“Say hey!” I sure wasn’t going to wait the whole seven minutes now. Maybe I was a little easy after all.
“Hey!” Davis said back. He stood and rubbed his palms on his khakis. His pants had an exceptionally sharp crease down the front, and I wondered who had pressed them—if his family employed a Birdie or a Norma at his house, smoothing and creasing everything over. “You look gooood,” he said in a way that made my blood thrum. “Your hair—it’s terrific.”
Davis opened the front door and I started to walk through it, but suddenly Mother was at my elbow, her voice low but not low enough. “Home by eleven,” she said. Then she amended: “Make it ten.”
I tossed my terrific hair.
Once we were outside, Davis said, “I don’t get it. Parents always like me.”
“It’s her,” I said, reknotting my cashmere cardigan, which was really Fontaine’s cashmere cardigan, around my shoulders.
“Okay,” he said with his great smile. “Okay, good.”
We drove in Davis’s banged-up Rambler down the spine of Peachtree, past the Steakery, the place kids went after school for Coca-Colas and onion rings, past a few churches, and past the lone temple, my family’s temple, where six hours earlier I’d been saying Kaddish for my father. A mile or so later, we pulled up to the Fox Theatre. Everyone called it the Fabulous Fox (everyone but Max), and now I knew why.
The theater had the razzle-dazzle of Radio City Music Hall, where I’d actually been exactly once, since it cost a fortune to see a movie there.
A zigzag line of Negro men and women, boys and girls, queued up outside the building—up the building, really. “What’s going on there?” I asked, nodding my chin to the left.
“Colored-only ticket line,” Davis said without a hiccup in his voice. “Leads to the Crow’s Nest.”
“It’s not that way in New York.” But even as I said it, I wasn’t sure it was true. There was no colored-only line, but I honestly couldn’t remember sitting next to a Negro person at the movies, and the last time I took a train to Harlem to see a movie at the Roosevelt, even though Harlem–Lenox Yard was only three stops north on the IRT, was never. I didn’t want Max and his know-it-all-ness to be on my mind, but he popped in against my will.
Davis opened an elaborate carved door in the front of the building, and I walked on an actual red carpet into an explosion of gold (not so very unlike the temple, really): gold walls, gold lights, a gold railing, and gold stars painted on the cobalt ceiling. This was my kind of sky—glittery and entirely indoors.
While I freshened up in the bathroom, reapplying my brand-new and as-yet-unmelted Fire & Ice in front of a giganto mirror, Davis stood in line for refreshments. One Coca-Cola, two straws.
Davis led me to an empty row toward the back of the theater, so there was no need to put Nattie’s posterior advice into action. Before I sat down, I fingered the fancy upholstery on the cushion, a six-pointed star, like a Jewish star, with a monogrammed F in the middle. The whole place was so swell, I couldn’t help thinking everyone, including people in the (Jim) Crow’s Nest, should be in the cushy seats.
I glanced up there, but my angle was off and I couldn’t see a single face.
When I looked back to our section, I saw a short man in a gray suit seated ahead of us. Something about the curve of his shoulders made me think—for two seconds—it was Dad. In those two seconds, I’d convinced myself Arthur Robb could have gained twenty pounds. Or aged twenty years. Or acquired a tan or a sudden need for glasses. Or a new gray suit. I remembered how I’d been wearing a gray jumper the day he died. I hadn’t wanted to take it off; if I took it off, the day would be over, along with the possibility of a different ending.
I scratched under my Fontaine cardigan. My skin was one big prickle. And then I stopped scratching, because Davis looped his
arm over the back of my seat. Not around me per se, but at the ready. It could drift down and make contact with my skin at any moment. My taffeta rustled.
“Thirsty?” Davis angled a straw my way.
I took a sip at the same moment he did. Two straws, two noses, two mouths. The sip was perfect. The sip was happiness.
“Have you seen Hitchcock?” Davis asked. “Rear Window? To Catch a Thief?”
“All so far. My dad loved him, loved the writing. You know the thing Thelma Ritter says in Rear Window? It’s something like, ‘When two people love each other they come together—wham—like two taxis on Broadway.’ He loved that. Every time we’d see two taxis on Broadway, he’d say that line. Every time.”
“I’m sorry about your dad, Ruth.”
“People always say, ‘Sorry about your dad.’ And I always say, ‘Oh, it’s all right.’ But I miss him. He would have loved this theater. He was a sucker for glamour.”
The lights dimmed. “I miss him so much,” I added under my breath.
“I bet he was something. I wish I could have met him, your dad.”
“I know,” I whispered, and I flooded with emotion for this dimpled boy who said the right thing to a briefly blue girl. “I know.”
The opening cued up in VistaVision. The screen filled with the image of Kim Novak’s lacquered lips and, just like that, Davis’s arm dropped into place—a nickel in the jukebox. My eyes stayed on the screen, on the giant spiral now circling Miss Novak’s eye.
He leaned in so slowly I wondered if he was going to actually kiss me or if he was merely evaluating me for my kissing potential.
Then he swooped in that last bit and we were legitimately necking.
Right away, we got over the awkward moment where you don’t know whether he’s going to the left or right, and you don’t know whether you should close your eyes or not. Right away, it felt like we’d been kissing for a year.
And the rest of the movie was more of the same. I wasn’t entirely following the plot, distracted as I was by the holy-smokes of the kisses. It flitted through my mind that the movie seemed to be about lies, and I hadn’t exactly been telling Davis the whole truth. But then he’d lean my way and my eyelids would flutter, and I’d think maybe the whole truth was overrated. If everyone told the whole truth, then Hitchcock wouldn’t have a career.
In the Neighborhood of True Page 11