And because love, wherever it happens, whenever it happens, is a miracle even when it is the most natural thing in the world and obvious to every fool in its purview, Laura Anne said, No. I do not. I rather think it makes me like you more, Mickey Moe Levy. A whole lot more.
Fates have been sealed on less.
Stuck in the heat of a Vietnam about to erupt in its first full-scale battle, Mickey Moe was reluctant to let go of his memories of meeting his wife. Reliving them brought her so close a sudden waft of tropical breeze felt exactly like her breath against his neck. It sounds like a fairy tale now, he thought. Who would have thought that summer day amid the sweet tea and little cakes that tribulation would be born? It should have been all Saturday night dinners and drive-in movies, but what we got were the sufferings of Job himself. Blood, agony, and loss all tied up in a bow. He shook his head, then smiled. It turned out alright, though, even if she did find out she was pregnant the day before I shipped out. We made it through the backwoods. We’ll make it through this. But who would have thought? Who?
Crackah Mick! Crackah Mick! Wake the fuck up! his buddy called out. We’re on the move!
Mickey Moe shook himself and snapped to with a big country grin. Sorry, Wiry, he said. I’m comin’.
He knew the boys thought him slow-minded when he was only a dreamer. Most of ’em were Yankees or city boys who couldn’t figure him out with a map. Seemed to him they had very peculiar ideas of what a child of the South might be. When he was polite in speech, they called him a pansy-assed born-again. When he emphasized no, no, he was a Jew and proud of it, sometimes they just laughed, half unbelieving. When it came to things like skinning a wild pig someone shot to improve on the cees, they gave him the task of butcher when he’d never touched game his whole life. No one noticed how he’d tuck his head into his chest to hide the retch he choked down when he split some critter’s hide, or how putting his hands into steamy innards made his eyes tear up. They jumped to conclusions. They thought him a good old boy, hard to blood and guts by birthright. He took on that role with courage for the sake of the unit, but in his heart he knew he was never anything but a good old boy, more or less. He wondered if he ought to set them straight, if their misperceptions made him a danger to others. In wartime, a man has to be who he is, no bullshit, stand up or stand down. Lives depend on knowing what another man is going to do and how he’s going to do it. It wasn’t his fault, he figured, that these Yankee blacks and Midwest whites stuck him in a round good-old-boy hole he didn’t fit, a square-peg Southern Jew in the middle of a war no one understood, least of all him.
On that day, as they marched single file up the side of the latest godforsaken hill, he saw a woman in distress stopped by the side of the trail they patrolled, her belly big with child and a broken wheel on the cart she pulled. He left his line and walked toward her calmly, patting the air with his palms to reassure her, smiling, nodding his head and showing his teeth so she wouldn’t be afraid.
Mick! his buddies yelled. Get your Jew-ass back here!
He waved behind himself to let them know he didn’t care what they yelled, he was going forward and sure, it didn’t make much sense, but after his reveries he wanted more than anything to fix the woman’s wheel as a way of making up to Laura Anne that she was pregnant and on her own. What did the hippies call it? Good karma.
So he smiled huge with plenty of teeth just as he hoped people back home smiled at Laura Anne, when suddenly the Cong mama pulled an automatic out from under a bundle of rags in her cart. That’s where he thought it came from anyway, but Oh Lord, he really didn’t know where she pulled it from, it was that quick. Showing him her own pointy little teeth to scare him, she grinned then screamed a yell as hard, as high as any rebel yell his ancestors marching to Vicksburg ever let rip and shot him. He didn’t even know where, it happened so fast.
Then everything got real slow.
He sank to his knees, keeled over on his side, and his eyes, weighted with iron bars, started to shut against all the will he had left. Before everything went dark, he watched her body flail helplessly about with the impact of his buddies’ payback fire. Pop-pop-pop-pop-pop. Her legs went in all directions, her arms pinwheeled, her torso seemed to have a thousand joints as it bent unnaturally to one side and then the other. Drops of blood fanned out around her in spirals of fine, long threads as she rose up in the air then fell down in the dirt. Like firecrackers, Mickey Moe thought, on the Fourth of July or New Year’s.
Stay with me, Mick, someone far away said.
How can I? Mickey Moe tried to answer from the dark, I’m here, and you’re not. But his mouth didn’t work or if it did, he couldn’t hear himself.
From where he was, he wondered where the baby went, where the Cong baby went, because last he saw of its mama flip-flopping on a current of gunshot, she didn’t have a baby-lump anymore. Maybe it was never there at all. Maybe he just imagined it, because he was that fresh from conjuring Laura Anne. Or it could have been where the gun came from. He pondered the options awhile, there in the dark, in the nameless dark. Why was it so dark in the middle of the day anyway? he wanted to know. And then he decided he liked it, this quiet dark place, this warm, pulsing cave you could burrow into deeper and deeper without moving a muscle. He hadn’t known such quiet for the longest time. Certainly not since he landed in Saigon. He might have stayed there forever, but the medic injected him with some kind of happy juice and the drug took instant effect. Light broke through dark, and the world came back to him. He was in it again but apart also, as if he was watching from somewhere else. His buddies barked orders at one another and moved around very fast, going nowhere except in circles around him. Then he noticed that he could not feel his legs, which were covered in bandages leaking blood. He wondered if the cause of his paralysis was the injection or if two dead limbs would be his ticket home. Somethin’ extreme has happened to my extremities, he tried to tell the boys as a joke, but all that came out of his throat was a high-pitched, hysterical laugh like a crazy person’s. Then he heard the whup-whup-whup of the helicopter arriving from somewhere far off to evacuate him. On hearing it, whup-whup-whup, faint like wings of a bird in a summer’s still meadow, his head, wherever it was, sang Laura Anne, Laura Anne, Laura Anne. The sound of her name made him feel that she was there beside him, and because she was so near he spoke to her. No, darlin’, he whispered. Do not worry. I am not going to die here. You are not at all my mama. And I am not my daddy. We are ourselves. We could never be those two.
II
Guilford, Mississippi, 1931–1943
BEATRICE DIANE SASSAPORT’S LIFE DID not turn out in the manner she anticipated. The privilege and promise of her youth encouraged her to have expectations. First off, Mickey Moe’s mama was hands-down the beauty of the Sassaport family, and beauty is its own calling card, embossed in gold. Beadie’s eyes were Tartar eyes, hazel and widely set, framed by a pair of arched eyebrows delicate as a Japanese brushstroke. Her face was oval-shaped, sweetly rounding at the chin as if the hand of God had cupped it in its formative stage. Her nose was straight, assertive but modest enough to allow her cheekbones and mouth to make more prominent statements. Such remarkable harmony was enhanced by a head of hair considered a marvel of shining black density too well behaved to frizz up in the heat. Her parents kept her out of the sun. Her skin was a rich amber and if six rays of sun got to her at the same time, her complexion went a shade darker than was prudent for a girl-child to sport in Guilford, Mississippi, at that time. From the cradle on, her family called her the Infanta as she looked a proper princess of Portugal, from whence her people had come to the South more than two hundred years before. She developed the figure and carriage for the evocation as she grew. Under the weight of constant praise, she could not help assuming a regal manner. The woman had airs. Etiquette was for her the very substance of civilized existence, what separated man from beast. If she experienced a situation for which none of the customary cues of proper behavior applied, she became so
distressed, she invented her own with determined and startling creativity.
Opposites attract must have been among her more conventional wisdoms. Mickey Moe’s daddy had been a short, stocky man, round and hard as a stew pot, with a peddler’s rough hands and plodding feet. If taken one by one, his features were handsome enough, but they settled in a bundle at the center of a globular head and were framed by a pair of jug ears. His large button eyes were capped by thick red eyebrows of a northward slant, and between them emerged a thin, straight nose that flared at the nostrils as unexpectedly as a trumpet vine in an arctic plain. Beneath that was a dainty but impeccably shaped mouth. All of it together made his adult face a tableau of something so innocent, so childlike that whomever he met in the course of a day could not help but look at him and smile. This was not the worst luck. Given a lifetime of genial regard from strangers and intimates alike, the man developed a radiant good humor that the Sassaports decided must be the source of his wife’s attraction to him.
When questioned on the matter, Beadie would demur. I believe he’s a good man, she’d say, and he’s entertainin’ and he’s kind, very kind, to me. One of the things she liked best about him was that he was respectful from the first, unlike other men who’d come to call. Even after his death, when all the world discovered Bernard Levy was a bounder, she revered his memory on that score.
Unfortunately, their daughters had not turned out like their celebrated mother, being more on the pleasant-looking side if you were kind about it. When they complained about their flaws, she’d tell them not to fret about themselves so. Be grateful, she’d say. Beauty is a curse. Men everywhere bother you, even the ones who seem so nice before they get you alone. They’re all hands and their eyes violate you a thousand times an hour. Now your daddy kept his hands to himself while we courted and his eyes where they belonged—on mine. That went a long way with me.
What she didn’t say, perhaps because it never really penetrated her consciousness, was that beautiful women are often the most self-critical, far worse than their pleasant-looking daughters. In secret, great beauties demonize every blemish. When such a woman appreciates a funny-looking man or an ugly man, the unworthy one is so astounded his affections can veer toward worship. That’s a heady tonic for an insecure beauty. Bernard’s respect, his near knightly devotion, most likely won her.
Or it could have been his money.
Bernard Levy, grandson of the founder of Levy Agricultural Supplies headquartered in Memphis, Tennessee, looked to have heaps of money when he first came to town, bags and bags of gold coin in weights sufficient to seduce every Israelite girl in Hinds County, including a half-educated belle socially crippled by her innumerable requirements and borderline skin tone. Bernard’s money worked its seductive magic for his son’s generation as well. Despite his family connections, Mickey Moe might never have been invited to the garden party where he met Laura Anne Needleman if his family had not been from the swell part of town. No matter that Daddy and his money were long gone or that his six-columned house peeled paint from every slat and sagged on its foundations into mud that had never dried out entirely since the flood, their address was old, important. The very best people lived on Mickey Moe’s street. It was a street so fine that when his daddy first moved in, everyone in the town whispered Bernard Levy must have made a deal with the devil to wind up there. At the very least, he must have bribed or blackmailed someone. Imagine that. A Jew on Orchard Street, they’d said, what do you all think he’s got on whom? No one could accept there was that much honest money in pitchforks, feed bags, and plow blades in 1931. In those days, farmers around sold their produce and cotton at bargain basement rates or saw them rot. They bartered what was left over for essentials they couldn’t grow or raise. They didn’t buy equipment. They repaired what they had or went without and tilled the soil the way their grandfathers did, with their own two hands and the hands of all their women and children, using the sharpest implements they could scavenge, or jerry rig, or steal. They furnished their own seed and their animals, if they could keep any, ate what nature left around for them to find. Yet Bernard Levy made money hand over fist at the family trade. Imagine that, they’d said the day he moved in, inventing unsavory explanations for how a Levy might accomplish such wealth off the souls of the poor.
Of course, the public solution Bernard Levy put forth to the puzzle of his resources lacked the colorful drama of pirated land and dispossessed widows the good Christian men of Guilford made up. When Beadie decided to ferret out the source of his wealth on their second date at the Rialto Cinema all the way over to Jackson, she chose phrases she thought would flatter him into candor.
You’re such a young man, Mr. Levy, she said, to have accomplished so much in the material sense. Everyone in Guilford is impressed by your industry. I suppose you worked after school as a child and all the summers from dawn to dusk, spending more time learning the art of commerce than your ABCs.
Bernard laughed and leaned back so hard in his fourth-row orchestra seat it cracked, startling their chaperone, Beadie’s brother Ben, into spilling soda pop all over the aisle. He commenced to lie as easily as a rougher man might cough or belch. I’m very sorry to disabuse you of that charming notion, Miss Sassaport, but the source of my riches is more mundane. I had nothing my whole life, and then one day my granddaddy died.
Beadie did not respond with the amusement his riposte encouraged. That’s terribly sad, she said, then favored him with a studied look of empathy, peeping up through her eyelashes and rounding her luminous almond eyes. She’d practiced the pose in the mirror ever since she’d seen Norma Shearer perform the same trick in The Devil’s Circus five years earlier. Beadie did it better.
It took all the self-control the man possessed not to gasp. No, Miss Sassaport, he managed, elaborating the falsehood that would steer his family for two generations, it is not. Granddaddy was ninety-seven year old and hadn’t known his given from his surname for six years. It was a blessing.
Four months later, Beadie and Bernard were united in matrimony. Between that happy day and the bombing of Pearl Harbor, Beadie refused to investigate the source of her husband’s wealth any further. Her reason was rooted in conviction. Beadie believed a woman’s job was to feather the nest, a man’s to provide the feathers. As long as Bernard allowed her to acquire dazzling plumage for the neighbors and relations to see, she asked no questions.
Bernard Levy may have been a liar and a scoundrel, but he was a family man, devoted and true. He loved his wife to distraction and for all the worst reasons. He loved her not because she was kind or accomplished, although she had at least a half-portion of each, but because she was beautiful. He loved her not for the quality of her spirit but for her bloodlines, which were as blue as a Southern Jew could possess. He loved her for her ardent application of rules for living, which from his perspective amounted to the same thing as the highest level of refinement. He was ignorant of society. His upbringing had been entirely rude. In short, he loved her because she was everything he was not.
For whatever reasons she chose him, shortly after the honeymoon in New Orleans, Beatrice Diane Sassaport Levy came to love her husband for the best reasons, although ultimately, each was exposed as a sham. She loved him because he appeared industrious, trustworthy, and educated. She loved him because he was of a family nearly as old as her own, one arrived in Charleston a mere two generations after the Sassaport ancestors disembarked at the port of Savannah. Those were brief generations, too. People often lived lives fleet as a June bug’s in that time, there was so much malaria, yellow fever, and pneumonia going around. Bernard’s pedigree was particularly significant to her. She was enchanted by the notion that the two of them, she and Bernard, were a pairing of eagles. Their children, when they came along, would be ranked among the oldest families in society, a democratic America’s equivalent of royalty. Accordingly, Ladies Sophie, Eudora Jean, and Rachel Marie, not to mention Lord Mickey Moe, were the joys of her young life, representative
of an achievement not even her illustrious ancestors had achieved. Their offspring made her better than her betters, you might say, better than those Old World peddlers and shopkeepers, those family icons of everything admirable in life for the way in which they’d triumphed over the meanness of history, putting down roots in a hard New World, and blossoming. Great as they were, Beadie thought, those peasants never approached the elegance of the Levys of Guilford, Mississippi. The old ones never imagined this! she sighed to herself as she wandered the cool, vast halls of the big house on Orchard Street just before solid, satisfied sleep. None foresaw these linens, these fruit trees, these porticos and piazzas, these nods from the gentile neighbors, hats tipped and heads bowed!
Bernard and Beadie were happy in their sumptuous nest. They were passionate. They were always laughing in the beginning. There were ripples of discontent, but these were minor, the breath of angels against still water. For instance, Beadie found it necessary to train Bernard in various aspects of social discourse. On one occasion in which she found him deficient, she straightened her back and spoke as sternly as she dared. Didn’t your mama teach you anything at all, sugar? She sighed, shook her head just enough to disturb her marcelled curls, a gesture she knew made his palms sweat. I’ve been told that you left only one calling card at the Parkers’ house when you know there are three adult women there. How could you insult them so? It’s one per female, darlin’, one per female! Bernard’s round face blanched as white as the moon in full. Beadie’s heart soared, thinking, how he regrets my displeasure! Her sweet chin, already aloft with pride, rose a little higher.
One More River Page 2