by Alan Shapiro
She wondered again why her mother wanted to take her on this “buying” trip, since she never had before, no matter how much Miriam had asked or begged—New York was Broadway, and the Follies, Fanny Brice and Al Jolson! But until last week, her mother had always said it was no place for a little girl, and anyway she had a business to run and didn’t have time to play when she was working. Someday Miriam would thank her for how hard she worked.
She studied her mother’s spectral features in the glass as if something in the tilt of her head, or the way the cigarette holder seemed to rise to her lips mechanically on strings of smoke, might somehow disclose the reason why her mother wanted her, this time, to come along.
The train whistle blew and suddenly it seemed the sun rose high enough to blot out all traces of her mother in the window. As if the girl herself had caused the sun to shine too brightly, Tula glanced at Miriam, and then pulled down the shade, and in the semidark continued working. If they had been at the store now, Miriam would have hidden herself within the circular rack of the most expensive skirts and dresses, behind the big pleats and godets, the flaring drapery, the way she always did, so as not to be noticed spying on all the customers who came and went all day. She loved watching them fingering the fabric, taking this or that gown off the rack and holding it up against themselves before the triple panels of the full-length mirror beside the dressing room. It amazed her how those women would enter the dressing room stoop-shouldered or stumpy, lanky or fat, in clothes as humdrum as the women themselves, and emerge a few moments later utterly transformed—their shoulders square, their figures sharpened by the crosscutting of the fabric or hidden by the glittering lamé.
When she was hidden away, unnoticed, Miriam could love her mother best, her store voice, so knowing and confident, telling her customers about the dresses and who designed them and how elegant they made the women look, how perfect their “bosoms” seemed in such a style. There was never any trace of the impatience and annoyance Miriam was used to. In her store, her mother sounded like a trusted friend, a confidante, someone who cared for nothing but the happiness of others. Tula would joke, too, about the absent men, the husbands, jokes that made the men seem like fools, like idiots, though how or why Miriam couldn’t quite say. “Oh darling,” her mother would exclaim, looking over her customer’s shoulder as the woman posed before the mirror, “don’t worry about the price! He’ll take out a second mortgage just to see you take this off.”
Now the train entered a tunnel and slowed to a stop. Her mother pulled up the shade and there she was again in the window, staring in and smiling. It was the same smile Miriam had seen at the store last Saturday. She had been on the phone with someone, and while she talked Miriam drifted to the back room where the mannequins were stored—everywhere there were naked bodies with bald heads, some lying on the floor, some leaning against the walls, others standing together like grown-ups at a party, except without wigs and clothes on they were indistinguishable. She touched one of them on the arm, ran her hand lightly over the swelling of the breast; it was smooth and cold and she didn’t understand what all the fuss was about, why the ladies who came to the store cared so much about their “bosoms,” and how the gowns and dresses showed them off or failed to. What was the big deal?
On that Saturday, from the back room, she could hear her mother talking—not as she usually did on the phone with businesspeople, saying she wasn’t going to “take a fucking,” and she would “cut his balls off if he tried to fuck her, did he understand that?” No, this time her voice was soft and low, and though Miriam couldn’t quite make out what the words were, it was pleasant to listen to them.
She concentrated so hard, Miriam still had one hand on a mannequin’s breast when she looked up to see her mother watching her. Her mother was smiling, her eyebrows raised. There was something in the look that made her blush with shame.
“So, darling,” her mother had said then, “how about you come with me next week to New York City, just us girls, isn’t that what you’ve always wanted? We can paint the town and, while we’re at it, get your grandmother off my back—what do you say?”
IT TURNED OUT that the tunnel wasn’t just a tunnel; it was a station, too. And now a man entered the car and sat down next to her mother. He was tall and slender; he wore a shiny gray suit, gray fedora tilted back on his head. “Hi’ya doll face,” he said. “What do you hear, what do you say?” His name was Mr. Perez. The ring on his left hand glittered; it was like the one Zaydie wore, only bigger and brighter. When he smiled, his left eye seemed to close in a kind of slow wink. He gave Miriam a peppermint and called her Senorita, as if Senorita were her name. For the next few hours, they laughed a lot, Tula and Mr. Perez. Her mother kept touching his arm and laughing. She’d never seemed so warm, so much like a girl. When the train finally arrived at Grand Central Station, the man helped them with their bags to the taxi, then rode with them to the hotel, he and her mother in the backseat, Miriam up front with the driver.
“You stay here, Miriam, understand?” her mother said, seating her daughter under a massive chandelier in the giant hotel lobby. Miriam watched her mother and Mr. Perez disappear into a golden elevator. People hurried through the lobby every which way, some trailed by Negro porters pulling carts piled high with luggage—couples arm in arm, and men in dark suits and hats, swinging briefcases as they strode past, newspapers tucked under an arm. This was not the New York she had imagined; this was a New York full of Tulas and the men she talked with on the phone. If only Bubbie were here, they would have been sitting in the Ziegfeld theater watching Fanny Brice by now. Maybe they would have gone backstage to meet the stars themselves. And afterward, they would have walked hand in hand down Broadway, singing “My Man” or “My Mammy.”
Miriam must have dozed off, for when her mother and Mr. Perez returned, she wasn’t sure if she was still dreaming. They seemed so happy, the two of them, happy and calm, and it embarrassed Miriam the way her mother held the man’s arm and how all through lunch in the hotel restaurant he would look at her mother and smile or kiss her on the neck. They seemed to hardly know that Miriam was there; she could stare at them all she wanted.
Finally Mr. Perez said he had to go—“to see a man about a dog.”
“What kind of dog?” Miriam asked, as he left them, but her mother said, “Never mind. We got to get going.”
For hours then, they walked the city; her mother’s high heels made it difficult for Miriam to hold her hand and keep up with her long strides. Her mother kept pulling her along, now and then yanking her. The sidewalks were crowded; people rushing by kept jostling her. There were bright jagged patches of sky overhead between the buildings and, down below, shadows as deep as night. An old woman in a baggy sweater and ripped scarves put her trembling hand out to touch her. “Stop gawking and keep moving,” her mother snapped. “Can’t you go faster?”
All afternoon, they went from factory to factory, up tiny elevators or dank stairwells, into high-ceilinged rooms—some full of rows of women at sewing machines that made the place hum like a giant beehive, some full of presses and mangles loud as gunfire. Everywhere there was the smell of smoke and leather. The men who worked the big machines seemed half-asleep; they looked up without seeing Miriam as she hurried past. At each place, she would sit in an outer office watching her mother through the glass as she talked with this or that man, sometimes laughing, sometimes arguing. At some point at each place her mother and the man would turn around and look through the glass at Miriam, and the man would shake his head or nod as if somehow the sight of the little girl had made some kind of point, or hadn’t.
Finally they came to a massive plate-glass window of a toy store on a busy avenue. Her mother said, “Stay here. Don’t move. I’ll be right back,” then disappeared into a doorway down the block. Miriam had never seen so many toys, too many to count: giant dollhouses, and dolls in the most stunning clothes, and tea sets with flowers delicately painted on the outside of the cups, the sau
cers rimmed with gold. An electric train ran through a winter village. She watched the small pistons shunting, and a thread of steam curl from the smokestack. There were thumb-sized children skating on a pond, a fire station with a fire truck out front complete with ladder and hose, and a schoolhouse with dime-sized windows in which she could see children at tiny desks. The village of a storybook, a fairy-tale village.
Then her own face was floating in the glass as lights went out in the store beyond the window; she was looking through a ghostly version of her own face at the toys and realized that it was dark outside. It was night now. How long had she been standing here, lost in dreams? It was night and people were hurrying by in both directions. She was dizzied by the hats and overcoats flowing all around her, the angry traffic. Where had her mother gone? Which building had she entered? She was crying now, bawling, a great big baby, too terrified to care, then out of nowhere her mother spun her around and knelt and, shaking her by the shoulders, said, “Didn’t I tell you not to go anywhere? Can’t you just do what I tell you?”
Mr. Perez appeared behind her. He was holding the hand of a little dark-skinned girl who was staring wide-eyed at Miriam. She had thick black hair that tumbled down over the shoulders of her coat.
“This is Juanita, Miriam,” her mother said. “Juanita, Mr. Perez’s little girl.”
Miriam wiped her eyes and nose and, still whimpering, shook the girl’s hand. The girl kept staring at her, saying nothing.
“We’re going to take you kids to a show,” Mr. Perez said to Miriam. Then he said something to Juanita in Spanish. His eye closed as he smiled. “What do you say to that? A real Broadway show.”
MIRIAM HAD NEVER been inside an actual theater before. Although many shows previewed in Boston before coming to New York, and Bubbie would often talk about taking Miriam to see them, she was always either too busy or too tired, or Zaydie would say they couldn’t afford it. But here she was. The enormous ceiling and the countless rows of seats, the balconies and the towering red curtains on the gigantic stage—she forgot all about the day and all that had happened. She barely noticed that her mother and Mr. Perez had left them there by themselves until she heard Jaunita whimpering.
“Shhhh,” Miriam said, touching the girl’s arm, which the girl then pulled away. “The show is starting. You can’t cry here. It isn’t allowed.”
When the orchestra hit the first note of the overture, Miriam forgot all about Juanita. She forgot everything but the world of Show Boat: the “Cotton Blossom,” that floating dream of song and dance, and the love of the riverboat gambler Gaylord for Magnolia, the captain’s daughter, and Julie, the singer with a secret past, her Negro mother, and the tragedy that follows, the tragedy and self-sacrifice, all of the bad things converted by the perfect bodies of the beautiful performers, by the voices and the dancing, into a truer life, a richer life—a life that while the show went on obliterated every trace of what went on outside the theater, destroyed it just as surely as the sun destroyed the image of her mother in the window of the train.
Scene III
After New York, there was outside and there was inside. Outside, there was the mess of too many things Miriam didn’t understand, there was divorce and a stylish and scary mother who was hardly ever at home, and grandparents who were kind but old and helpless, and a sad and mostly absent father. But now inside, there was Miss Julie, the mulatto singer who somehow made the mess outside seem far away. Julie would wear only formal dresses and her best shoes. She wouldn’t raise her voice, and she wouldn’t cry; Julie possessed a sorrowful and mysterious air. Julie would never play in the streets, she wouldn’t know from hopscotch or four square or any other game. When they’d ask her why she was this way, all Miss Julie would do was sigh, hold the back of one hand to her forehead and turn away. No one would smile knowingly at Julie or embarrass her with everything she didn’t know—she had lived and seen too much for that. Oh, some of the narrow-minded in her world might scorn her. Let them. In doing so, they only showed how small their hearts were, how little they understood about the terrible things that happen to the purest of the pure. Julie wouldn’t cry or whine, even when those around her said it wasn’t natural—acting like an adult the way she did, a goyishe adult at that, and not a girl. Julie wouldn’t cry even when teased about her father, for Julie had no father. She would sigh and walk away. All day long she’d hum “Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man” or “Ol’ Man River.” “What’s wrong with you?” they’d ask. “Why don’t you act your age? Stop acting like some crazy adult. It isn’t right.” But Julie knew right from wrong. No one knew the difference more surely than Julie.
THE RABBI’S OFFICE was in the basement of the synagogue. It was windowless and sunk in books, old books, thick books, a mound of them open on his desk, their onionskin pages torn or dog-eared. The walls were lined with shelves piled high with folders and more books, the linoleum floor awash in notebooks and loose sheets of paper. The black-suited rabbi had a long yellowish beard, and his skin, too, was yellow, the color of parchment, his fingertips ink-smudged. The office smelled of mildew and chickpeas. Directly behind him, two large wooden replicas of the tablets of the Ten Commandments, one in Hebrew, one in English, were hung side by side above a bookcase.
When she entered, he gathered up the books on the chair beside his desk and placed them on the floor. “Come,” he said, “come, sit.” He patted the seat, leaving a palm print in the dust. As she stepped carefully to the seat, she looked down at her shoes, their sheen already dulling.
He said her mother wanted him to talk with her. The rabbi’s face was kind but grave. He was smiling at her, his dark eyes narrowing to nearly nothing, but his smile was full of sadness. This was the first time she had ever spoken with Rabbi Mandelbaum, the first time she’d ever stepped foot inside his office. What did he know about her? What had he been told about the trip to New York City?
Suddenly she was back in the train watching her mother’s face adrift there in the window, looking down at her account books while warehouses and vacant lots passed through it. She saw her mother disappearing into a golden elevator with a man Miriam didn’t know—what was his name, Perez? What kind of name was that? And then she saw Miss Julie in the blazing stage lights, looking out into the audience, looking out at Miriam herself, at Miriam and no one else, and singing about all the feelings Miriam didn’t know she felt until she heard them in Miss Julie’s voice. If there was sorrow in that voice, there was beauty, too, and the beauty made the sorrow seem weightless, ghostly, like her mother’s face.
“My mother?” she said. “You mean my stepmother. My poor mother is dead.”
“Dead?”
“Dead, yes.” She sighed. “But it’s better this way; she isn’t Jewish.”
“Isn’t Jewish? How can this be?”
“She’s Negro,” she said.
“Negro?”
“Yes, Negro. I’m mulatto; I’m an outcast, Rabbi. My father . . .”
“But Miriam, dear . . .”
“And my name’s not Miriam, it’s Julie.”
“This is nonsense.”
“No, Rabbi,” she said. “It’s tragic. It’s a tragic story. I’m going to die a drunkard.”
“Tragic? Die a drunkard?” He took his glasses off and rubbed his eyes. “What do you know from tragic?”
He told her that she had her whole life to be tragic in; who knew, God forbid, what lay in wait? If God didn’t want us to be children when we were children, we’d have all been born in suits and dresses; we would be born with bills and mortgages and children of our own. Even Jael, little one, even Sarah, Rachel, Esther, and Ruth, they were all little girls once. It’s a sin not to enjoy the gifts God gives.
“Rabbi, excuse me, but what about Eve?”
“Eve? What about Eve?”
“She was never a girl, was she?”
“And look what happened? Look at the trouble she caused! From playing with dolls, she didn’t suffer!”
They stared
at each other for a long moment. Then his face grew solemn. One hand stroked his beard while the other pointed over his shoulder to the tablets above his head. “Darling, can you read?”
“Of course I can,” she said. “I can read. The English anyway.”
“Okay, then, dear, read commandment number seven. Read it out loud to me. Read it slowly, darling, please.”
She looked up at the tablets and in her best elocutionary voice intoned, “Thou shalt not commit adultery.”
Her eyes grew wide. “Adultery? It’s a sin to act like an adult?”
“See,” the rabbi interrupted, nodding wisely. “This is no joke. This is serious business.”
“I’m an adulterer?” She couldn’t speak. Tears welled in her eyes.
“Don’t worry, Miriam. Go home, God will forgive you. Of this I’m sure. Go home and get out of these fancy clothes and play with your friends. God will forgive you if you play like the Jewish child you are.”
But Miriam wasn’t listening because Miriam wasn’t Miriam—she was Julie, the singer, the mulatto, the drunkard, and now, best of all, the adulterer.
“SO, MIRIAM, THE rabbi, what did he say?” Zaydie asked that night at dinner.
Miriam didn’t answer. She was studying her plate of food.
“Miriam,” he asked again, “the rabbi, what did he tell you?”
“Are you speaking to me, Grandpapa?”