by Alan Shapiro
“A moment ago I was,” he said, lifting a teacup to his lips. “Now, I’m not so sure. Rabbi Mandelbaum, what did he say?”
“I’m an adulterer,” she declared.
Slowly he put the teacup down. Hands over her mouth, Bubbie seemed to be coughing.
“Hoo boy,” he said. “That’s some big deal.”
“Yes,” she said, wiping her mouth primly with a napkin. “An actual sin.”
“You’re telling me,” he said. “But, kindele, what are you gonna do about it?”
“What’s to do?” she answered sadly. “I’ve been adulterating for so long now, I’m not sure I can stop.”
“Oh no,” he said, “I don’t mean the sin. The golem I’m talking about. Didn’t the rabbi tell you about the golem?”
“No,” she said. “Who’s the golem?”
“He comes for the little girl adulterers, and he spits on them and they grow old right before his eyes.”
“Older than you, Zaydie?” she asked.
“Older than me and Bubbie combined,” he said. “And all they grow is bald, like a cue ball bald, I’m telling you, and they shrink, and wrinkle, and fall apart like a rag, a shmatta, a good-for-nothing sack of ash. They don’t remember nothing. They don’t see nothing. They mumble to themselves they don’t know what, until all their teeth fall out but one, and that one has a toothache. ”
“Can’t anything be done to help them?”
“No,” he shakes his head. “No, once the golem’s spit is on you, you’re his forever. Go cry to him and all you’ll hear is ‘Miss such-a-hurry-to-grow-up, you want to be an adult? Be an adult!’ ”
She pictured a windowless dark apartment where nobody lived except her and the golem and the women mannequins, all naked and bald and smoking phantom cigarettes. She pictured the golem laughing and cursing in her mother’s voice, as she herself got older and older, walking with a cane first, then a walker, then using a wheelchair, and then confined to bed, a shriveled dummy, shriveled and bald, too weak to roll over or call for help, only the golem’s wicked “You want to be an adult, be an adult” in her ears.
“Is it too late for me, Zaydie?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “But, kindele, go to your room and get your dolls out and play with them. Golem will be looking for Miss Julie, not for Miriam. Play with your dolls and maybe he won’t know she’s here.”
She ran to her room and got down only her baby dolls. She made the baby dolls ga ga and goo goo each other; she made her voice as young as possible, even younger than Baby Snooks, as far away from tragedy as Mattapan was from Manhattan, as the golem was from the little girl she’d try from now on to be.
TO MAKE AMENDS, Miriam believed it wouldn’t be enough for her to be a child; she had to be the best child, the most considerate and beautiful child. She had to be liked by everyone, especially the sad, the disappointed, the vexed. She’d befriend the outcasts and the scorned. When Zaydie’s butcher shop went belly-up, and her mother’s business nearly faltered, she ate less so there’d be more food for others. She cleaned not just her own room but Zaydie and Bubbie’s room as well. She cleaned rooms that didn’t need cleaning. And it was during this time of penance and restitution that she tried to befriend Sylvie, the fat girl across the street.
Sylvie had red hair, a dimpled chin, and cheeks that jiggled madly when she talked. She had what Bubbie called a “foul mouth.” She was mean to everyone, as if she wanted everyone to hate her. But Miriam would get through to her. Miriam would change her for the better. Playing with Sylvie would show the golem how good Miriam could be, how far she had come since her days as an adulteress.
She knocked on Sylvie’s door one Saturday. “What do you want?” Sylvie’s mother asked.
When Miriam said, “I was wondering if Sylvie could come to my house this afternoon to play,” Sylvie’s mother said, “You mean it? Seriously?”
Her mother pushed Sylvie out the door. “You girls have fun,” she said. “Sylvie, play as long as you like.”
They went to Miriam’s house and played dolls in her room. Miriam wanted to play family—mother feeding child, mother cuddling child, mother pushing child on swing. Sylvie just watched scowling. Then Miriam suggested they play Dancing Lady, the new musical picture show that had just come to Boston, the new poster for which had just been slapped up on the billboard over Fleischman’s Bakery, and she danced her husband and wife dolls around and around.
Then Sylvie said, “Hey, I have an idea. Let’s play divorce,” and grabbing the dolls from Miriam, she banged the husband’s and wife’s heads together, and then picked up the baby, and cried, “Wah wah wah.” Then she picked up the husband again, saying, “Shut up, you little runt, you, or I’ll tear your whiney little head off.”
“Why do you want to do that?” Miriam asked.
“Nobody’s ever played with you like that, I bet. And where’s your dopey father anyway? Probably screwin’ some dirty tramp.”
As if it belonged to someone else, Miriam’s fist flew at Sylvie, hitting her square in the jaw. Sylvie fell back and scrambled to her feet. “You’re just like everybody else,” she screamed, and Miriam felt the floor shake as Sylvie, crying, lumbered down the stairs and out the door.
Later that night, Sylvie’s mother called, asking to speak with Miriam. Fearing the worst, Miriam picked up the phone. Sylvie’s mother wanted to know if Sylvie could come play with her again tomorrow afternoon. Miriam broke another commandment, one she hoped the golem didn’t care so much about: “Sorry,” she said. “I’m busy tomorrow. Maybe next week.”
Scene IV
As the next few years went by, the world became larger and smaller at the same time. The kitchen radio was always on in the evenings, even during dinner. They listened amazed and angry to Father Coughlin and his anti-Semitic ravings, or to the news in Europe, which was worsening by the day. All through the broadcasts, Zaydie would mutter, “Bastards, no-good goy bastards.” But Miriam couldn’t bear to think about Hitler or inflation or the fall of Europe or what now was being blamed on the Jews. Every day more and more strangers from the old country were arriving in the neighborhood. There were stories of persecutions reminiscent of the Middle Ages, of biblical times. The world seemed fearfully unsettled. She was seventeen years old, a senior at the Girls’ Latin School in Dorchester. She had ambitions, dreams. Like her friends, she wanted to marry and raise wonderful children, but she also fantasized about the theater, of a life of teaching and acting, singing and dancing. And yet who knew, what with war coming (everybody said it was), what sacrifices would be demanded of her, what obstacles she’d have to overcome. And as if all that weren’t bad enough, there was her speech-interpretation teacher to deal with—Gertrude Pinkerton, the faculty adviser to the drama club to which no girl could be admitted without her say-so.
Mrs. Pinkerton was a widow, and even though her husband, Curtis, had passed away ten years ago, she still dressed only in black to commemorate what she called their “matrimonial alliance.” He had been, she told the girls, a poor relation of the Pinkertons of the Pinkerton National Detective Agency, so they should think of her, their teacher, “as the national detective, the enforcer, if you will, of the beauties of the English language.” She had a long face and narrow nose, and her mouth seemed fixed in a permanent look of being put upon, her thin lips turned down somehow even when she smiled, which she hardly ever did. She greeted her class each morning by reminding them of how many days were left in the school calendar and how many days were left till she herself could finally, thank God, retire. “Good morning, ladies,” she would say, as they all took their seats. “You’ll all be pleased to know that there are one hundred and fifty-six days remaining in the school year and, by my calculations, eight hundred and seventy-four days, give or take a day of sick leave, remaining in my illustrious career patrolling these august halls of learning.”
She had divided up the class into three separate choruses based, she said, on the heft and resonance of thei
r voices. Miriam thought it an odd coincidence, though, that she had put all the gentile girls into one chorus, all the Jewish girls into another, and all the Irish and Italian girls into a third. She had then divided each chorus further into high and low voices. Those with high-pitched voices she referred to as “light,” and those with low-pitched voices she referred to as “dark.” Then she had assigned the choruses a poem to learn each week; whichever chorus gave the best performance, which meant striking the proper balance between dark and light, earned the privilege of giving a public recitation to the entire school at Friday-morning assembly and, best of all, the opportunity to join the drama club.
At the beginning of each class, Mrs. Pinkerton would have the entire class read out loud from the introduction to their poetry anthology to remind them of what a poem was. “Louder, ladies,” she would say, “louder, enunciate, please, no mumbling, expectorate the ‘spuds’ from your mouth, please.” They would read together about how “verse originates in intense emotion which finds no ready release in activity; this pent-up feeling quickens one’s sense of rhythm and expresses itself in a manner of speech adequate both to the thought and to the pulsing motion of that thought, and this in turn enables one to gain a heightened power that allows him to substitute ‘unity’ for frustration, routine, and the boredom that comes from emotional poverty.”
Each morning, as Miriam read these sentences, she would imagine that she was reading instead about the stage and all the feelings that a song released. She longed to perform publicly, to sing in front of others. She had a good voice, everyone said so. And everyone said, too, that she was beautiful—her big blue eyes so eager to take in everything around her, her hair done up in the latest fashion, her blond curls and waves swept up off her high forehead, her figure made more slim and rounded by the crepe day dresses she loved to wear, by the drapes and folds that followed her sleek shape. Movie-star good looks, they said. Shirley Temple, all grown up. She noticed how men mostly, but even some women, would look at her now when she was passing in the street.
But it was already spring, and her chorus, “the Jewesses,” as Mrs. Pinkerton called them, had never once, not once, been chosen to recite to the school. Only the gentile girls’ chorus, week in, week out, seemed able to strike that je ne sais quoi balance between light and dark, to articulate the just-right tonal subtleties of Tennyson or Longfellow, Shakespeare or Keats. The Irish, Italian, and Jewish girls were either too light or too dark. It was unfortunate; it wasn’t their fault, Mrs. Pinkerton consoled them. “The tang of steerage,” she said, her mouth grimacing into a smile, still clung to their intonations.
SO MIRIAM FORMED a drama club of her own with a few girls from the neighborhood. They met once a week on the weekends, each week at a different member’s house. Each week a different member would choose the songs they’d sing or the scenes they’d stage. Sometimes they told jokes, and sometimes if the space was large enough they danced. But no one, not ever, was allowed to bring in poems to recite. That was Miriam’s one restriction. Mrs. Pinkerton had given her enough of that. She named the club the Mattapan-Manhattan Club—the Manhattan Club for short.
One Saturday in May at Dottie’s house off Talbot Square, they were learning a new hit song, “Polka Dots and Moonbeams,” when a boy showed up—his name was Frankie Kaufman, and he was Dottie’s cousin. Twenty-two years old, he was tall, stoop-shouldered, and shy, with thick dark hair falling over his forehead, which he combed back with his fingers. He couldn’t take his eyes off Miriam. She loved how it felt being watched that way, being listened to. Dottie, too, saw how he was watching Miriam and asked if she would stay for supper. And before Miriam knew it, she and Frankie were sitting side by side at the dinner table, and he was telling her about his life, his dreams, how he lived with his mother and sister, that his father had died a few years back, and that he was determined someday to travel the world, then go to college and become a teacher. He wasn’t sure, though, if any of that would happen anytime soon, not with the war coming, and besides, his little sister was crippled from a childhood accident, and his mother’s eyesight was failing, and right now he was all they had—so he was working in a downtown shoe store.
Miriam could already see herself as Mrs. Frankie Kaufman; Miriam Kaufman—the name had a nice ring to it. It startled her how quickly the dream took shape, the two of them in Watertown or Newton, maybe Natick—Mrs. Kaufman, the teacher’s wife. She could do theater on the weekends or maybe teach it in the schools. And they would travel in the summers till the children came. With a father like that, what brains they’d have!
So lost was she in that imagined life, she hardly heard a word he said.
After dinner, Dottie put “Polka Dots and Moonbeams” back on the gramophone. Frankie asked Miriam to dance. A great dancer he wasn’t, but she could teach him. When the song was over, he asked Dottie to play the song again, and they kept dancing. Miriam sang as they danced. Every now and then, Frankie would tilt his head back and look at her adoringly as she sang: he couldn’t believe his great good luck—that’s what his look said. Dottie and her parents watched them. Miriam could feel the envy they must be feeling, watching her glide back and forth across the floor, which could have been a stage, with Frankie, too, now singing “Polka dots and moonbeams around a pug nosed dream.”
NOW IT WAS summer, and if she wasn’t working at the store for her mother, she was with Frankie. The Mattapan-Manhattan Club dissolved without Miriam’s intensity holding it together. Sometimes it disturbed her to think how easily her passion for Frankie had displaced her passion for the stage. But they went to shows and pictures. He loved the theater as much as she did. He loved to dance, and he loved it when she sang to him. Once they were married, and Frankie had found a teaching job worthy of his smarts, maybe then she would return to school.
In the meantime, she worried. They’d been dating for several months and still he hadn’t introduced her to his mother and sister. By then, he’d met her mother and Zaydie and Bubbie. She’d even brought him to the butcher shop in Brighton where her father worked, though he was too busy to come out from behind the counter. He had apologized and smiled shyly and said, as he always did, that soon they’d get together. Everyone of course approved. Her mother said he was a catch; well, what she said was “he’s a safe catch,” whatever that meant. But whenever Miriam asked him when he was going to bring her home to meet his family, he would hem and haw. It just wasn’t the right time, or someone was sick, or there was too much going on. What was he afraid of? She knew he had fallen for her. No one, he said, could make him laugh as she could; she was so beautiful, so lively, what had he done to deserve her? She was just the kind of girl any fellow would want to marry. Meeting his mother and sister was the next logical step. It was embarrassing to have to tell her friends and family it hadn’t happened yet. They’d raise an eyebrow: they’d say, I’m sure he has his reasons, but she could tell they thought something was up.
One Saturday they were walking home after seeing The Philadelphia Story, when she stopped suddenly and threw her arms around his neck and kissed him. Right there on the street in front of everyone, she kissed him. People stepped aside as they passed, some smiling, some clapping. “Go get her, tiger,” someone called. Arms still around his neck she said, “Frankie, sweetheart, it’s time to introduce me to your mother.”
“You don’t understand, Miriam,” he said, running a hand through his thick black hair. “It’s complicated.”
“It doesn’t have to be,” she said.
“My mother, my sister, they’re not ready. They need more time.”
“For what? What’s to get used to with someone like me?”
“It’s not you,” he said, sighing.
“Then what it is?” She pulled away from him. “Are you ashamed of me?”
“Ashamed of you?” He shook his head. He held her face between his hands. “No, honey, I just . . . I, okay, listen” (she’d never seen him look so full of sorrow), “how about next Saturday
? I’m working at the store, but I’ll get away for lunch. How does that sound?”
“Good,” she said. “I know they’ll love me.”
MRS. KAUFMAN WAS wearing a bathrobe and tattered slippers when they arrived. She was a tall woman with a long neck and unkempt hair that made her look as if she’d just come in out of a windstorm. Her gaunt face looked confused, like a sleepwalker who’d suddenly awakened and had no idea where she was. Her eyes were magnified and warped by the thickest lenses Miriam had ever seen (they looked like insect eyes seen under a microscope). Miriam had to keep herself from staring. Mrs. Kaufman apologized for not having gotten dressed. Looking vaguely in Miriam’s direction, she said, “Ronnie wouldn’t let me sleep all night, what with the pain in her legs, and the moaning, and then this morning the buckle on her leg brace snapped off; I called Bernstein to come fix it; he said he couldn’t get here till this afternoon. I said, what am I supposed to do, carry her to the toilet? I can hardly make it there myself. Anyway, you don’t need to know all this. Come in, come in.” Mrs. Kaufman led them through the dark apartment to the sunroom, her fingers brushing the walls, the backs of chairs, the tables, feeling her way along.
Ronnie was seated on the couch, a massive metal brace on one leg, the other spindly and bowed, extending from her house dress. Her legs looked stiff and lifeless, like the legs of the unused naked mannequins in the back of Tula’s shop. Two black canes, one on either side of her, were propped like sentries against the couch. Her frizzy brown hair made her face seem longer and thinner than it was. She could have been Miriam’s age, or older, maybe even older than Frankie.
Like a small girl, though, she said, “Frankie, sit next to me, sit with me, Frankie.”
As Miriam took her seat, Ronnie smiled a smile that had nothing friendly in it.
“So, Frankie,” Mrs. Kaufman said, “this Miriam’s a real beauty.”
Frankie’s eyes twitched; he looked down at his feet, as if he’d just been scolded.