A Private Sorcery

by Lisa Gornick

  He smiles, thinking about his daughters, and Rena imagines him with the two little girls from the photograph and then his wife as a larger version of the girls, all of them pajamaed and laughing on a kingsize bed. “They can play the piano?”

  “Ditties. ‘Itsy-Bitsy Spider.’ ‘Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.’ Things like that.”

  Beersden pulls on his boots. He leans over the bed and kisses her on the cheek and then the mouth. She resists the impulse to reach out to him, is relieved that he knows not to say anything as he turns to leave.

  BEFORE BEERSDEN, RENA had tried to resume a normal schedule on the weekends. But it had been impossible to engineer. She’d get home from work at eight in the morning on Saturdays from her Friday shift and need to sleep. Having slept all day, she’d be unable to get to bed until early Sunday morning. The whole thing would replay itself on Sunday, and then Monday would roll around and she’d need to sleep anyway before heading off to work that night.

  With Beersden, she gives up entirely since it’s after his gigs on Saturday and Sunday nights that he comes over. Two in the morning, he arrives with bags of food: bagels and lox, souvlaki, pastrami on rye. He stocks her refrigerator with dark beer, and they have a picnic on the floor of her bedroom with a sheet spread out to catch the crumbs and pillows to prop themselves on so they can watch the night river traffic: the barges lit with only one red flare on bow and stern guided by perky tugs bedecked in green lights. On moonless nights, the water invisible, the tugs appear to be sailing through the sky with sparkling rubies in their wake. The gourmand’s gourmand, Beersden calls himself, arching back his neck to open his jaw for the enormous sandwiches, dangling a slice of shiny red onion under his nose before tossing it onto the discarded wrapping paper. “Oh, what lust will do to a man—to give up raw onion!”

  At first, she thinks that their affair is based on his taste for the night scene: that Beersden has spent so much time in clubs, he can sense her time at Alil’s. He scrutinizes the selection of Saul’s CDs and tapes she’s kept, picking pieces they can dance to. “Usually guys take their music,” he says, but does not question her further when she tells him that Saul’s new quarters are too cramped. Saul had been a listener, not a dancer; other than the obligatory slow dance at a wedding, they’d never danced together. Beersden holds her hips. He sings the lyrics like Bob Dylan gone jazzy. One night, they roll up the rug in the foyer and he teaches her how to samba to a recording he’s brought of the Johnny Colon Orchestra.

  “Hey, babe,” he teases, “we could run away to the Catskills and do a dance act. You’ve definitely got rhythm in your blood.” Walking to work the next evening, she can’t get the phrase out of her mind: rhythm in your blood. Something in her blood. A link to her father.

  She turns south on Columbus Avenue. It’s early September, the week after Labor Day, and the restaurants are filled with people back in the city after the summer respite. Tanned faces sip Campari and white wine on the skimpy outdoor terraces. Everywhere, grilled meats, curlicue greens, baskets filled with herbed rolls. In fact, she really hasn’t thought about her father in years. As a girl, she’d gone through phases when she would ask her mother the same questions over and over: how her mother had met her father, what he’d looked like, the things he’d done with Rena. “He used to sing to you,” her mother would say. “Sing and play his saxophone. He bought you a toy saxophone, but of course you only wanted his.”

  In all the years that she’s been here in New York, it has never occurred to her that perhaps he is still here. She adds numbers in her head. Her mother nineteen when Rena was born; her father three years older. Fifty-six.

  She doesn’t even know his last name. Sam. That’s all she knows.

  SHE WAITS FOR the office to empty before calling Eleanor. As always, there’s the surprise at how well her mother sounds—no hint of the leaden depression after Gene’s birth, of the monumental frenzy after Joe’s death. And yet, despite the changes, the years that have passed since the very bad times, she’s not been able to bring herself to tell Eleanor about Saul’s arrest.

  “ESP,” Eleanor says. “Gene and I were just talking about you. He’s been thinking about driving cross-country once he saves up enough money. He’d come visit you and Saul and then head down to see a friend who’s living in Georgia.”

  The low point between them had come shortly after she and Gene moved to New York when Eleanor, living in Eureka with a roll-towel salesman she’d met in a bar, accused her of stealing Gene. At the time, Rena had brushed it off as the alcohol talking, but later, after her mother pulled herself together and Gene returned to California, she found herself cautious with him, afraid of doing anything that would make it look like she was trying to usurp her mother’s role. “When would that be?”

  “Oh, don’t hold your breath. His car needs a lot of work and he owes me five hundred dollars for his insurance. No trip, I’ve told him, until I’m paid.”

  Rena lurches forward. “I know this is weird to ask now, only I just realized that I don’t know my father’s last name.”

  Eleanor doesn’t answer immediately. Then, slowly, she says the name. “Freedman. Freed with two e’s.”

  “Did he stay in the city?”

  “I don’t know. I haven’t heard from him since you were three.”

  “I thought I was two when we moved.”

  “You were. For the first year, I kept a post-office box. He would write these letters about not knowing if he should get a private detective to find us and get custody of you or if he should just let me go and let us make our own life. I guess in the end that’s what he did.”

  “I’ve never even seen a picture of him.”

  “I don’t have any. When you leave the way I did, packing up in an hour, you don’t bring the photo albums. Not that we had photo albums. We didn’t live that way.”

  “Did you know his parents?”

  “I never met them. They lived in Riverdale. I don’t think his mother ever knew about us. His father was a fancy lawyer. He knew, but he wouldn’t visit.”

  “Because you weren’t married?”

  “Because I wasn’t Jewish.” Eleanor sighs. “It was a different time. Your father, they hardly left him room to breathe with all their demands. When I walked out that front door, or rather snuck out, I thought I was in love with that dumbo Johnny Campanella. If it was love, though, it was the quickest case to hit New York, since it disappeared by the time we reached Pennsylvania. I think maybe on some level I was trying to save your father. We were just barely scraping by. He was driving a cab during the day and playing his music at night. I couldn’t control myself. I was complaining all the time that there wasn’t enough money for diapers, for meat, for new shoes for you. He was starting to talk about maybe he should get a real job, maybe we should get married. I felt like I was destroying him.”

  Rena feels everything moving in blurred, undulating patterns, Beersden’s story, her father’s story, as if she needs to clear her head, get fresh air, but all the windows are sealed, the temperature controlled from a box twenty-six floors below. After they hang up, she goes to the copy room and pulls down the Manhattan and Bronx phone books. In Manhattan there are three Samuel Freedmans and another five S. Freedmans. In the Bronx there are four Samuel Freedmans and another three with the initial S. She tries to imagine telephoning all these numbers. What would she say? I’m Rena Peretti? I’m wondering if you’re my father?

  FOR SEVERAL DAYS, it’s cold and damp, never raining but always on the verge. Walking home in the gray mornings, she fantasizes about going back to California, about a path Reed once showed her south of Mill Valley that leads out to the beach, the long grasses yielding first to a warm lagoon before being overpowered by the huge rocks and the cold spray of the Pacific. She wonders if this is where Reed has gone, perhaps somewhere farther north, a bit inland, where countless people who, like Reed, have abandoned the lives their parents imagined for them scrape by doing a little this and that.

&nb
sp; On a couple of occasions, Reed had driven her to visit Eleanor and Gene, the visits always timed with one of Joe’s out-of-state hauls. Eleanor was still on medication then—not as much as when Rena had been in high school, but enough to keep her bloated and tired all the time. She and Rena would sit on the steps, not saying much, watching Reed teach Gene to throw and catch one or another kind of ball. After one of the visits, Reed said to her, “It’s a question of the glass half empty, half full. In a way, you’re free with your mother. Nothing you do is going to disappoint her.”

  At the end of the week, what Rena thinks of as an Eleanor-letter arrives. Her mother began writing letters after she had left the roll-towel salesman and moved back to Novato to try and stitch together a life, the early letters page after page of uncontrolled thoughts, a great gush of language addressed to both Rena and Gene, oblivious, it had seemed, to either of her readers. Two or three would arrive each week, the pace slowing as Eleanor settled into her new pursuits: the bookkeeping course, the garden she planted in the yard where Joe’s junked cars had once been berthed, the yoga classes she began attending. “Never again will I serve pancakes,” she wrote, “never again will I fill a ketchup bottle, count change from my apron pocket, argue with a cook about whose hair landed in the sunny-side-up eggs.” Then, later, after she ripped up the mildewed wall-to-wall carpet and bartered with Russell (the junked cars, Joe’s monster television set and old couch in exchange for Russell painting the walls, upstairs and down, a butter frosting), Rena amazed not only by the deal her mother had struck but by the fact that Eleanor had been able to see Russell for the two-bit philanderer but decent painter he was, Never again will I live with a man.

  Those letters were handwritten on the crosshatched ledger pads Eleanor had received as part of her bookkeeping course. Since she got her job and Gene returned to live with her, the letters have been printed on shiny copy paper.

  Dear Rena,

  After our phone call, I called my sister Betty. I asked her if she had any photographs of your father. We used to go to her house a lot when you were a baby what with my father being as he was and all of us scared of ruffling his feathers. That was where my mother would see you, at Betty’s. Once, I told my mother that I was sick of it and I was going to tell my father about you. She looked me smack in the eye and said, I wouldn’t do that, Elly. That’s what she called me, Elly. I think she was afraid he’d kill you due to some crazed idea that a child with a Jew for a father was the devil. As if I’d had a baby with a goat.

  Betty said she never throws anything out, just stores it in the attic, and she’ll get Donny to bring down the boxes of photos she keeps up there and she’ll look through to see what she has. I gave her your address and she said she’d send you whatever she finds.

  I have a new boss—a woman! She has a little boy, five years old, and she’s always asking me questions about did this happen or that happen with you or Gene. It’s so strange, I tell her, but I can hardly remember what it was like then. It seems like such a long time ago.

  You should see my garden. I’ve added some fancy stuff—pineapple lilies and this vine called Spanish flag. There’s a Chinese man across the street who planted his entire backyard with snow peas. Everyone talked behind his back about what a stupid thing that was. Yesterday, he told me he’s made four thousand dollars so far this summer selling snow peas to restaurants in Chinatown!

  It was good to talk with you. Are you making any progress figuring out what you want to do now that you’ve left your political consulting job?

  Love to Saul.

  A string of X’s and O’s follows, and then her mother’s loose, loopy Eleanor/Mom.

  During Eleanor’s only trip east, when she’d come to take Gene back to California after his three years with Rena, they’d gone to Staten Island to visit Betty and Donny. It was the first time Rena or Gene had met their grandfather, living by then with Betty and Donny, too ill with Alzheimer’s for there really to be anyone to meet. On the ferry ride over, Eleanor had tried to prepare Rena: “Your aunt, she’s very dramatic. Sarah Bernhardt, my mother used to call her. When we were girls, she would attract busloads of boys with her gorgeous red hair and her tight sweaters. Donny was the sexiest boy in the neighborhood. After they got married, he went to work in my father and uncle’s fish market on Fulton Street. Betty couldn’t bear staying home alone with the baby, so she’d bring him into the store and she and my mother would trade off watching him. Really, my mother would mostly watch him. Betty would be out front in the store, flirting madly with anyone who had hair on his chin. Then she’d see Donny smile at a female customer and she’d go nuts. Twice she chased him out onto the street with a fish knife, threatening to cut off his you-know-what.”

  Donny, a big man with a full head of unnaturally black hair and a friendly, impersonal smile (the same display of bleached teeth directed at the other descending passengers as at his sister-in-law), met them at the ferry. He surveyed Eleanor—slender and pert in her navy slacks and taupe blouse, her hair cut in a way that accentuated her round brown eyes—and grinned. “My God, El, you look like the day you left. Now don’t let your jaw fall out of your face when you see Betty.” He rearranged the chains on his neck and made a whistling sound. “She’s gotten pretty big.”

  They drove in Donny’s maroon Ford down streets of clapboard houses, each with a porch and a driveway and a large tree and a flower bed in front. “Betty’s been cooking and cleaning up a storm, waiting for you to come. She still had her manicotti on the stove’s why she sent me to get you.”

  Donny pulled up at a house with a cupid fountain set in the lawn. “We got a pool, an above-ground back from when the kids still lived home. And a barbecue pit, we call it Donny’s kitchen.” He led them inside to a room with a white shag rug and white leather couches covered with plastic and a wall hung with pieces of mirrors mounted in a diamond pattern. Betty appeared in a haze of red: red hair, red lips, red nails. A pink apron swaddled her girth. Flowered leggings covered legs as thick as telephone poles.

  Donny videotaped Betty hugging Eleanor, narrating all the while that this was the historic meeting of the Peretti girls. Betty kept putting her hand out to block the camera, which she addressed in a stage whisper: “I’m not really this fat, it’s just the video that makes me look this way.”

  Betty showed them the backyard, where an old man in a ratty blue cardigan sat slumped in a lawn chair. Saliva ran down a gully etched between the corner of his mouth and the bottom of his chin. Gene splashed around in the pool while Betty tried to get her father to recall his youngest daughter: “You remember, Dad. Eleanor, Elly, the one who moved out west.”

  The old man kept his eyes on the lawn, Betty repeating herself more and more loudly as though the problem were one of audition until finally Donny, grilling clams on the barbecue, called out, “Christ Almighty, Bet. Give it up. He clearly don’t remember.”

  Rena helped Betty bring the food out to the picnic table while her mother sat quietly stroking the old man’s hand, her face set in a way that made it impossible to guess what she was feeling. The old man refused to touch the clams but ate some of the manicotti after Betty leaned over and cut it into small pieces. Then, in the middle of dessert, he looked up at Eleanor. “You’re that actress, the one in that movie.”

  Betty started to cry. “Look at this hair,” she said, pulling at the top. “Every week, I sit in that goddamn beauty parlor under that burning dryer. Look at these nails.” She thrust her long red nails, each with a gold stripe running diagonally across, toward Eleanor. “I wash him, I do his stinking laundry, I clip his toenails, and you’re the one he thinks looks like a movie star.”

  Mascara ran down Betty’s cheeks. The old man kept his eyes fixed on Eleanor. Gene stared at Betty.

  “Goddamnit, Betty,” Donny hollered, “you start in on this jealousy shit and I’m out the door,” and Eleanor looked horrified and then helplessly at Rena, who quickly gathered up Gene’s wet clothes and their bags and sweaters
, mumbling all the while, no, no, they really had to go.

  THE LAST WEEKEND in September, Beersden and his band have a gig in the Hamptons. He books a room at a motel in Montauk, far enough away that it’s unlikely he’ll bump into anyone he knows. On Thursday, it turns hot. Against her better judgment, Rena agrees to come. She leaves work early, takes a cab home and sleeps for a few hours before getting up to pack an overnight bag.

  At noon, an hour late, he calls. There’s a tension in his voice she’s not heard before. “Sorry. I’m just walking to the garage. I had some things I had to deal with before I could leave.”

  It’s nearly one when Pedro buzzes to say that Mr. Beersden is here. Downstairs, she looks for him; she’s not seen his car before. Across the street is a blue station wagon. He’s leaning back with his eyes closed. Behind him are two children’s car seats.

  Rena opens the rear door and puts her bag at the foot of one of the seats. He opens the passenger door. It’s daylight. They’ve never been out in daylight. He reaches a hand across the front seat, out of sight from the street, to touch her leg.

  “Sorry,” he says again. “Sherry threw a fit about having the twins to herself this weekend even though her parents are coming in.” Rena watches the contortions in his face: the wish to reassure her that he wants to be here with her. The inability to rid himself of his concern for his wife.

  They drive largely in silence. She imagines Sherry on her hands and knees with the minivac cleaning up crumbs, the girls hot and whiny in the cramped, toy-strewn apartment.

  As they reach the Long Island Expressway, her lids grow heavy. She yawns.

  “Get some sleep.”

  She rests her head against the door and dozes. When he pulls off the highway for gas, she keeps her eyes closed.