If he ground them any harder, she thought, his front teeth were going to snap.
“Then get out.”
She turned from the refrigerator, where she was looking for the cream.
“I beg your pardon.”
“I said get out.”
“Get out where, Jesse? Where would you have me go?” Her words were slow and deliberate, her blue eyes cool as a High Sierra lake. She stared at him until his gaze broke. Then his body followed, crumbling bit by bit like a china doll that had been dropped. He leaned forward as if his stomach hurt, his chin tucked. His right arm and leg pumped in unison, knee toward elbow. Tears poured down his face like the rain rivuletting on the kitchen windows. This didn’t look like acting anymore. This was for real, for, more than anything, though he didn’t know what to do about the mess they’d gotten themselves into, Jesse loved Emma to death.
His voice sounded like breaking glass as he cried, “I can’t stand this anymore!”
Emma stood staring at him for moments that seemed hours long, holding the cream in one hand, her pink-and-blue mug in the other. Everything inside her was stopped. There was a dazzling white quiet in her head.
Then something clicked. Finally, after months of indecision, Emma knew what she was doing.
“Jesse,” her voice so soft he could hardly hear her, “you’re right. I need twenty-four hours. I’ll be gone after coffee tomorrow morning.”
* * *
He stood naked in the doorway, early-morning bleary-eyed, watching as she slammed the trunk of her little blue sedan. Even the rumple of pillow prints on his face couldn’t hide his disbelief.
Had he thought she was joking?
“Where are you going?” he called into the bright air washed fresh by the rains the day before.
“Home.”
“To Louisiana?”
“No, to Alaska. Where do you think?”
“You hate it in Louisiana.”
“So what?”
“So why are you going there?”
“You know, Jesse,” she smiled her not-very-nice smile, “one of the nice things about leaving is that we don’t have to have these stupid conversations anymore.”
At that he turned on his heel with as much dignity as his nakedness would allow and slammed the door behind him.
She was almost out of the driveway when he reappeared, partially covered by his robe, followed by Elmer, their collie. Emma’s heart lurched. No problem leaving Jesse, she thought, but you’re sure as hell going to miss the dog.
“When are you coming back?”
“I don’t know,” she called over the revving engine.
“You’d better be back in time for dinner.”
“I wouldn’t count on it.”
She stepped on the gas and was gone.
The miles had flown by. Leaving California was easy, zipping down Highway 5, the straight six-lane north-south red line through the middle of the state. There was nothing to see and nothing to do but drive.
Emma kept waiting for the bottom of her stomach to drop, for a cold hand to clutch it and make her tremble. Instead, she was grinning into the wind. She felt like Elmer with his head hanging out the car window, ears flying.
She fiddled with the radio, finding more and more honest-to-God country-and-western stations as she drove into the Big Valley.
Why didn’t she feel scared, sad, broken-hearted like the good old boys singing on the radio? All she seemed to feel was relief.
Maybe it was because this wasn’t really running away from home—if she was also running to home on the other end. Except Louisiana hadn’t been home for many years, and she really didn’t know why she was going there. To see Rosalie and Jake? That was a joke.
Maybe she’d told Jesse she was going home to make him mad, because she knew he hated the South.
Let’s think about this a minute, Emma. No need to cut off your nose to spite your face. You don’t have to go to Louisiana just because you told Jesse you were going to. That’s even more reason not to. Why don’t you go back, pack your stuff, and leave early for Italy?
It was too complicated, the travel arrangements, they wouldn’t be expecting her.
Emma kept driving south.
* * *
There was Bakersfield, quick, she missed it. Then she hung a left and headed east across the Mojave Desert as the sun set behind her back. She stopped with a toe still in California, pulled up in front of a motel in Needles. Just across the dotted blue line on the map was Nevada.
Dinner was a hamburger. Not bad. Maybe she’d eat nothing but hamburgers all the way. “The Definitive Emma Rochelle Fine Tree Survey of the American Hamburger.” Back in her room, she took a long hot shower, pulled back the swirly orange-and-brown bedspread and collapsed.
She stretched and rooted. For the first time in four years she was truly alone again. She could read in bed all night long if she wanted to. She could call room service, if there were room service. She could eat nothing but Mallomars, drink a fifth of Southern Comfort, bathe in it if she wanted. She could do anything she was big enough to, when she got around to it.
For now, she reached into her zippered bag and pulled out the new paperback she’d been waiting to have a chance to read.
She held the book up and stared at its cover. Even Cowgirls Get the Blues. Well, she’d just see about that.
But Emma and the cowgirls didn’t ride very far together. Four pages down the road, she began to fade. It had been a hell of a forty-eight hours.
She switched out the light, snuggled down and began to drift, when a thought lit her mind like Las Vegas neon.
Goddamn Jesse to hell! Why did he have to remind her, with his soft sweet insidious seduction, that lovely fucking, before he’d gone insane and pounded into her as if she were a piece of liver, that he remembered exactly what would sweet-feel her into boneless, mindless lust?
Come, now, Emma, she asked herself, did you really think that he’d forgotten?
Then why didn’t he ever do it? she argued with herself. Why had it been so long that she’d forgotten that he knew?
Because he’s an ornery, manipulative six-plus son-of-a-bitch, that’s why.
That settled, she closed her eyes and relaxed—for a moment.
Is that what you’re going to tell them when you get to West Cypress? Are you going to tell on Jesse? Tell them that he’d been fucking around instead of sweet-fucking you until you decided to do the same?
Of course not.
There would be cold comfort indeed in spilling out all her troubles to Rosalie and Jake. She wasn’t quite sure why she was headed south, but it sure as hell wasn’t for that.
They weren’t that kind of Southern parents. And she wasn’t that kind of Southern girl.
Southern girl…she was drifting again. Words played hide-and-seek on a drive-in movie screen in her mind.
Hell, what was a Southern girl? After all those years away, was she one anymore?
Jesse had always teased her—You can take the girl out of the South, but you can’t… And what was it about Southern girls? She remembered a childhood singsong.
Nice Southern girls don’t drink or smoke or go with boys who do.
Southern girls don’t say shit even if they have a mouth full of it.
Southern girls definitely don’t screw.
And Southern girls don’t go out in the sun.
Emma drifted further and further, then her body jolted. She balanced on the knife edge of sleep.
Don’t go out in the sun ’cause it’s bad for your complexion, makes your skin all dark and wrinkly like a prune. Then who will want to marry you? And if you’re not married, honey, where are you? You’re alone in the world, with nobody to love or take care of you.
The way she was right now.
At least, that’s what most folks would say.
Except Rosalie.
She wouldn’t say that at all.
She’d say, had always said since Emma was a little girl, �
�Emma, don’t you ever depend on a man. Most of them are no good, even if they look it at first. Girl, you better learn to take care of yourself.”
Emma had taken care of herself. She always had. Even when she didn’t want to.
And years later, when she was grown up, long after all the others in West Cypress had written her off as an old maid, Rosalie Fine had never asked that terribly rude question that others posed: “Why’s a good-looking girl like you not married?”
Though when Emma finally did meet and marry Jesse Tree, she hadn’t bothered to tell her parents.
As she’d said to Jesse and herself, there were lots of things Jake and Rosalie hadn’t told her.
Keeping secrets ran in the family.
2
West Cypress, Louisiana
1944
It was late in the evening of Jake Fine’s third night on the road when the bus driver announced, “Next stop, Cypress, Louisiana.”
Jake stretched and yawned, as much to relieve his nervousness as his fatigue. What was he doing here?
Then the baby in the seat beside him whimpered. He looked down at her and remembered. Emma, she was the reason he was three days and nights and fifteen hundred miles from New York City, Emma and the promise he’d made to Helen.
“If anything happens,” she had said, somber-faced, four months pregnant, “promise me you’ll never give up the baby, Jake. Find it another mother, but don’t ever let it go.”
So Jake was on this bus, changing diapers, changing his life as the miles rolled on, setting out on his second giant migration. And though the distance of the first, from Minsk to New York City, was greater than that from New York to West Cypress, he had a feeling that the changes were going to be just as momentous.
Jake leaned his bald head back against the prickly brown cushion once more. His hazel eyes closed. He didn’t want to think about what might lie ahead for him. It was too terrifying. The past was safer. The memories of his first trip were like sepia photos, crackled and faded, but nonetheless preserved.
* * *
He could see himself as a tiny boy in short pants holding on to his mother, Riva’s, hand. They were in a tremendous open hall jammed with thousands of people all jabbering in languages he couldn’t understand.
A fat woman on the bench next to them whispered rumors into his mother’s ear.
“They won’t admit you if you have more than four children…. They send you back if you have lice…. You have to have a job…a relative who can vouch for you.”
Then, finally, up the long stairs they marched, his father, Isidore, straight-backed and stern, his mother Riva, with Rhoda, Moe and Jake holding hands between them.
“Hurry,” Isidore urged them. “Take the stairs in big steps and don’t stumble. It’s a test, to see if you’re strong enough to make it.”
They’d streaked up the steps and soon were on the ferry headed toward buildings taller than he’d ever imagined, even in his dreams.
As the breezes blew his hair, Jake looked up at his stern-faced father with pride. Isidore was a macher, a mensch. He knew his way around. Two years earlier, he’d made the journey alone. Now in this place called Battery Park he waved away the flailing arms of men shouting their offers: “Rooms…” “Over here, jobs…” “Work papers, I’ll get you work papers…” “Trains, where do you want to go?”
Isidore knew where he was going. The first time, a greenhorn, he had almost ended up on a train for Houston, Texas, rather than on a trolley for Houston Street and the Lower East Side. But he had found his way, had worked in a kitchen, behind a pushcart, in a boiler room, to earn the dollars with which to bring over his family.
This time, with them firmly in tow, he stayed on the trolley until it reached Grand Central Station. He had moved up and out of the city already. There was an apartment waiting for them, six rooms at a respectable address in New Haven, Connecticut. There the family would live and three more children, Joseph, Ruth and Sidney, would be born.
Jake smiled as he thought of that first apartment’s kitchen, the kosher meals his short, round mother prepared, the kasha, the borscht, the chickens yellow with fat. What kind of food was there going to be in West Cypress?
Outside the bus windows, the lights of Cypress were beginning to flare through the flat blackness like Friday-night candles. Jake could see himself in the mirror of remembrance in a yarmulke, serious-faced among the children as they watched Riva light the Sabbath candles. Were there synagogues in the South? Were there even any Jews?
The city lights grew brighter, and his pulse quickened. It wouldn’t be long now. He thought about friends he’d left behind: the Goldbergs, who had lived next door in New Haven. They’d come over a couple of years earlier, and their kids were already as proud and as street-smart as the natives. They taught the Fines more English than the Cedar Street School. And they taught them stickball, how to order in the candy store, how to fit in.
It was their father, Nathan Goldberg, who taught Isidore the fine arts of distilling and bottling. The smell of their homemade hooch, rich and ripe and yeasty, filled the whole neighborhood until Riva put her foot down.
“What are we going to do, Isidore, when they lock you in prison and send you back to the other side for this little bit of extra money? Are you going to be happy then, when the children and I starve to death?”
Where was Jake going to find another friend like Herb Goldberg, who had stood under the wedding tent with his sister Rhoda? Rhoda and Herb—they had been the first, when the family had started to grow smaller, yet larger; Rhoda, then Ruth, then Moe, and on down the line, the children had married and left. Except for Jake. Jake had stayed at home.
“You’ll find someone, Jakey,” his mother hugged him and said. “The right girl will come along.”
But Jake knew that she wouldn’t.
He was the one who had dropped out of the Cedar Street School the earliest, after the sixth grade when he couldn’t take the taunting anymore: “J-J-J-Jake, wh-wh-what’s the matter, cat got your tongue?”
He could rattle on in Yiddish just as well as the next one, but when he had tried to wrap his tongue around this new language it twisted and turned.
At home he told tales about the weekend trip to Coney Island, the rides, the roller coaster, the beach, the daring with which he had jumped into the mammoth waves—that big. He bragged in the kitchen to his mother and his favorite redheaded sister Ruth until they threatened to toss him out.
But his father insisted. “He’s got to speak English, Riva, if he wants to get ahead.” So his mother tried her best to practice the little English she had with Jake, but late at night, after Isidore had gone to bed, it was in Yiddish that they whispered.
Those nights couldn’t last forever, though, and as Jake grew and the family shrank, he became more silent. As long as he said nothing, no one could laugh. He sought out jobs in the back of a grocery store, in a cannery, a cleaner’s, jobs that he could hold with no education, jobs where he could keep his mouth shut.
Long days of work ran one into the other until one of the Goldberg boys said, “Come on, Jake, let’s go see the world.” Why not? That’s what the Navy promised. And for three years he was a real man, a sailor in San Diego. He went home with tattoos blue as the Pacific on both his forearms. The heart, the flowers, the cowgirl, Mom—they were on special, he told his mother proudly, a bargain twenty-five cents apiece. Back home in New Haven, Isidore frowned: Jews don’t have tattoos.
Isidore had frowned at him more and more after his return, so he hadn’t settled back into the family house but moved into Manhattan. There eight, ten, twelve years had slipped by, the days all the same at one job or another, the evenings brightened by picture shows and vaudeville.
Al Jolson, Burns and Allen, and Jack Benny were on stages just minutes away on Broadway. The movies were a quarter, and dime novels, especially his favorite detectives, filled the stands. These were enough for Jake. So the twenties, the thirties, his twenties and thirtie
s, passed; except for the visits to his family’s homes, he lived his life quietly and alone.
Until Helen. At first he hadn’t seen her in the dark hallway of his rooming house on upper Broadway and had bumped into her coming out of the room next door.
“Sorry,” he’d muttered and then flushed. He was always bumbling, he thought, always putting his foot in it.
“Oh no,” she’d said in a soft Southern drawl that prolonged and multiplied every word until it sounded like three. “It’s my fault. I should have looked where I was going.”
And then he looked at her. She was tall for a woman, an armful, with soft brown hair and a pretty smile.
He’d thought about her for days after, listening in hopes of hearing her through the wall. He found himself racing home from work in the evenings, taking a quick shower in the bathroom down the hall and dressing in his best pleated pants, a fresh shirt. Then he sat and listened. When he heard her radio go off, he grabbed his coat and ran out the door. They almost collided once again.
She’d smiled. “Well, isn’t this a coincidence? Neighbors back home run into each other all the time, but here in New York it seems like everyone’s just strangers. Doesn’t it?”
Jake nodded and ducked his head. He wanted to talk to her. Oh, how he wanted to talk with her. But what to say? And how to make his tongue do his bidding?
Goddamn you, stutter, behave! he shouted inside his head.
“Yes, b-b-b-bu…” He couldn’t get it out. Goddammit, he couldn’t. He wheeled away.
“But what?” she asked softly. Was she laughing at him? “But you aren’t a stranger, are you, even though I don’t know your name.”
“Jake,” he’d managed. Quick, he’d outtricked his tongue. “Jake Fine.”
“Helen Kaplan.” She’d stuck out her hand. Jake couldn’t believe it—a Jew with a Southern accent. “I’m on my way to get some Chinese food for supper. Would you like to join me?”
Over chow mein she told him she’d been in New York a year. She was from Georgia, from a small town. She was working as a clerk and seeing doctors at Mount Zion. Something about her heart. Two weeks later they had married at City Hall. Helen was lovely in a pale-blue gabardine dress. Jake’s vanilla-colored suit looked like ice cream. The next day they moved to Baltimore. The jobs were better there, Helen had said, shipbuilding for the war. It was early spring 1943.
Keeping Secrets Page 3