“Are you all right, ma’am?” Nelson said when he saw her.
“Home, please,” she said, and almost fell into the back seat.
She huddled in the corner, tried not to catch Nelson’s eye; she didn’t want him to see her cry. And what was it she was blubbing about anyway? She didn’t want him or anyone feeling sorry for her. It was from shame, pure and simple.
They drove away from the dark, crowded streets, into the wide thoroughfares uptown, back to Central Park and the high world of the Upper West Side, where it was possible to breathe, and to forget. On the way she promised herself she would tell Dewey about this, and not about Mary Donnelly only, but about everything.
All this keeping secrets, it had twisted her out of shape, made her someone she did not recognize, someone she had never wanted to be.
She would tell him. He would not judge her; he would know what to do. After all, that was his business, taking care of things; making good decisions, sound decisions; never losing sight of what was important. She had to do it. She could not bear to carry this burden anymore.
If you tell the truth, then you can’t go wrong. That was what Mary would have said.
She looked out the window. They were already back in that other New York, the New York of hotels and jewelry shops and money. This was not her New York, it never was.
“I must tell him,” she murmured aloud.
She saw Nelson watching her in the mirror. She didn’t care if he saw the tears running down her face, not anymore. She was done with pretending now.
It was late when Dewey got home. His bow tie was askew, his suit rumpled, like he had been in a fight. His hair, always so slide-rule straight, was disheveled. He put down his briefcase, and they looked at each other. Then he walked into his study and shut the door behind him. She would always let him be whenever he was like this, but this time she followed him in.
Dewey poured three fingers of whisky into a glass. She heard the crystal tinkle as it rattled against the lip of the decanter. His hands were shaking.
“Are you all right?” she said.
“Bad day.”
“How bad?”
“You should sit down,” he said, and even those four words made her knees feel like Jell-O, and she collapsed into the nearest chair.
“Sarah, there’s something I should have told you.”
She tried to make light of it. “You’ve been playing the market, don’t tell me.”
He nodded.
“Really? How bad?”
He winced.
“Please, no.”
“I didn’t intend for this to happen.”
“You told me once that you never play yourself. You said that was for schmucks.”
“I know what I said.”
“What will we do?”
“I’m sure everything will be fine. The market always recovers. It always has.” He sat down at his desk and hung his head.
Never had she seen him like this. His shoulders heaved, and she realized he was crying. She got up and put her arms around him. Oh God, she thought, this must be really bad, worse than even I imagined.
“Whatever happens, I won’t let anything bad happen to you,” he said.
Sarah sat on his knee, stroked his head, put her arm around his shoulders. He sat there, slumped in his chair, like a boxer who cannot come out for the final round.
“Don’t worry, Dewey. Whatever it is, nothing is that bad. We can get through this.”
“You can say that because you know what it’s like to be poor. I don’t.”
“Being poor is nothing. I can do it, anyone can.”
“No, you were born to it. It’s different. You don’t understand.”
She took his face in her hands. “Don’t talk like this. You got me, you got Liberty.”
“Have I? Have I really? The one thing I know about being poor, you can’t borrow on credit.” He eased her up off his lap. “I need to be alone for a while.”
“Dewey . . .”
“Please, Sarah, let me be. We’ll talk about all this in the morning.”
Sarah went to bed, sat up reading, left the bedside light on for him. She couldn’t concentrate on her novel, fell asleep she didn’t know when, and when she woke, he still wasn’t in bed. She looked at the clock beside the bed. It was after three. She crept out to the hallway. The light was still on in his study. She thought about going in, hesitated with her hand on the door. She took a deep breath and eased the handle, but it was locked.
She went back to bed. Perhaps he is right, she thought. It was easy to be rich, but to be poor, well, that took real chutzpah.
39
Tuesday, October 29, 1929
She was supposed to make nice at an afternoon tea at Jane Pargetter’s, but she’d canceled, some little voice inside telling her to stay home. Instead, she sat in her study, trying to write a letter to Mutti and her father. The apartment was quiet. She wouldn’t let even the cook have the radio on in the kitchen anymore. It was only bad news, and she didn’t want to hear it.
In the middle of the afternoon, she heard Constance go to the door in the foyer and then heard her husband’s voice. She was surprised. He had never come home so early before. She got to her feet and hurried out to see what was wrong.
Dewey was standing in the living room, swaying back and forth, staring up at the ceiling, as if he was deep in thought.
“Darling?” she said.
“Hmm?”
“What are you doing home?”
“Need some time off.”
“But what’s happened at the market?”
“The market? Oh, it will all work out.” He smiled at her. “Everything will all work out now.”
“You look pale, like nobody’s business.” He was still holding his shiny leather briefcase. She took it from him. “What can I get you?”
“Coffee perhaps.”
“I will fetch Constance, ask her to make a fresh pot. Something stronger, you wouldn’t like?”
He shook his head.
She put the briefcase by the door and went to find Constance, told her to make a fresh pot of coffee and bring it to them on a tray in the living room. But when she came back, Dewey wasn’t there. The French doors leading out to the terrace were wide open, and the curtains were billowing in the afternoon breeze. Had the doors been open when Dewey came home? She couldn’t remember.
Puzzled, she crossed the room to shut them.
“Dewey?”
She saw a pair of black lace-up Oxfords perfectly arranged at the edge of the terrace. They looked just the way he arranged his slippers before he got into bed at night, side by side, pointing outward.
She thought she could hear someone screaming down in the street.
Suddenly she realized what had happened. She felt sick. “Oh, Dewey,” she said.
She dared a glimpse over the rail. Dewey was lying face down on the footpath, twenty-three floors down. A little crowd had gathered.
There was nothing to be done. It was all over.
40
The movers were carrying furniture out of the apartment to the elevators. Sarah and Liberty stood in the middle of the living room and watched them. Neither of them spoke. What to say? It reminded Sarah of those poor schlemiels getting thrown out of their tenement back in Delancey Street, their paltry things sitting on the sidewalk, so sad looking. A plate of pennies sitting there. She’d heard the tinkle of a few coins thrown in the plate, the shame of it. How much further could a person go and still be a person?
She felt light headed. She hadn’t slept well, hadn’t really slept at all since it happened; twenty minutes here, half an hour there, dressed on the sofa in the middle of the day. The rest of the time she had spent drinking coffee, wandering around the apartment, staring at the clock, the paintings, the floor, trying not to think.
She had a dull, throbbing headache. It hurt her every time she moved her head. What could she have done to stop him?
What could she have sai
d? “Dewey, I don’t care if you lost it all.” In a way, it would have made them equals at last. It would have been him, with just the shirt on his back, and her, with a daughter she had stolen from one of his best friends. I wonder what he and the rest of the world would have said to that?
It would have made it easier to tell him about Libby. Now, because of what he did, she wouldn’t have to. Life was funny.
Oh, Dewey, you didn’t have to do that. Losing money is not the worst thing a person can ever do, believe me.
Finally, Liberty spoke. “So how much did he lose, Mama?”
“Everything, bubeleh.”
“How much is everything?”
“I don’t know. Three million. Four million. When it gets to be so many numbers, how can anybody count?”
“Wasn’t there life insurance?”
“He thought there was life insurance.”
“What happened to it?”
“He was so busy with his stocks, he forgot the premiums. He let it lapse, his secretary forgot to tell him, and now the company won’t pay, not a cent.”
“Could we take them to court?”
“If we had the gelt, we could get a fancy lawyer. But to get money for a fancy lawyer, first we got to take the insurance company to court.”
Two men in overalls carried out their gold brocade chaise. Another had a walnut grandfather clock; Dewey had told her once it had been in his family since New York was still a colony, that was how old it was. Did they have clocks then? Perhaps he was making it up. Still, it was something all right.
“What happened to Nelson and Constance?”
“I had to let them go.”
“Oh, Mama. How did all this happen?”
“I don’t know. I said to him once, you got so much money, how much more do you want?”
“And what did he say?”
“He said: ‘Just a little bit more.’”
The movers had even taken all the carpets, and with only the parquet floors, the place echoed like they were in a cave. Cherubs played on white clouds on the ceiling fresco over her head. They can’t take those, she thought, but if they could, I would give them for nothing. Where does a fat baby get from flying in the sky? These goyim, she had been a part of them, but she never understood them.
“So now what will we do?”
“Look at the view, bubeleh. We won’t see the world from up here again for a long time. From tomorrow, we start seeing the Elevated from underneath again.”
“We’ll get by.”
“We always did before. But don’t lose that hat. A long time before I can buy you another one like that from Saks.”
Liberty took off the cloche and threw it over the edge of the balcony, the exact spot where Dewey had jumped. “That’s what I think of Saks,” she said.
PART 5
41
Greenwich Village, 1933
July in New York, and a sweltering sky, breathless and gray, like a blanket had been thrown over the whole grimy, sweating city. Sarah went down Bleecker Street, stopped by Zito’s to get a warm-smelling loaf and pick up the spare keys to the walk-up on Cornelia. Zito, he kept spare keys, rings and rings of them, that all the people in the neighborhood left with him in case they locked themselves out. Like she had that morning.
Here everyone lived on top of each other, like on Delancey. It was only a few blocks except it was a different world, a place of row houses and coffee shops, grocers and fruit vendors, with sagging awnings outside and Italienish words in the windows, selling everything from pasta to pizza to headache powders.
It was like being back in the shtetl, an Italian one maybe, with cannoli instead of knish. But it was the goodness of people, that was what she liked. She never knew such goodness in Arlington Apartments or in Long Neck, even if she did see the sky every morning instead of a fire escape or the sooty girders of the Elevated.
They were selling corn and broccoli from pushcarts, a newspaper boy was calling out “Extra! Extra!” though this extra was all rotten as usual: Adolf Hitler and dust bowls and some gold standard or such business she didn’t understand. Only thing she wanted to read was how they were opening a theater in New Jersey where you watched the movie outside, and you went in your car to see it. Good luck on such people in New Jersey to own a car. Whatever will they think of next?
She stepped into the gloomy hallway of their walk-up, evil smelling it was, stinking of old cabbage. She could hear that Brudebaker yelling at his wife, such a schlemiel that one, always drinking. They’d made the Volstead Act because of people like him.
There was a letter for her in the slot. She knew it by the handwriting and the kind of envelope it was, the row of lilac and pink ten-krooni stamps with one red one.
Etta.
She hurried up the stairs to their apartment, put the letter right there on the table, and went to the kitchen to see if there was any cream soda in the icebox. Days like this, she missed the refrigerator cabinet that Dewey had bought for her. She never minded so much before she was rich; that was the worst thing about losing everything: you remembered how easy life was. Dewey had told her that, before he died, and he had a point. When poorness had been normal, she never minded so much the mouse droppings in the drawers and listening to the jabber of everyone around, their phonographs and pianolas and the yowling of the cats down in the alley under the windows.
These days she never missed the fancy-schmancy mah-jongg parties at the Pargetters’ or sailing with the Charltons on Long Island. What she missed were the easy-life things and never thinking, What if the rent man comes today, and I cannot pay? There was no one to say, you want eggs for breakfast, you want lobster Newburg for dinner? Such a life. Like a dream now.
What was so bad about the millionaire life was how it made you feel like you suffered when you were poor again.
But the worst thing was, every day, knowing she had let down her daughter.
But where was she? Sarah looked at the clock on the shelf. Should be home by now, she thought. She finishes at five o’clock, same like me. When should I start my worrying?
When, from the first day I held her in my arms, did I ever stop?
She sat down and tore open the letter from Etta; months since she last heard from her sister. She read through quickly, first for bad news, like she always did; and there it was, just under “Dearest Sarah.”
My heart grieves to tell you that our vati is gone.
She read it again and again, wanting to feel like she should, like any good daughter should, waiting for anguish, waiting for tears. But nothing. It was like reading about some stranger in the newspaper.
Vati is gone. She tried to remember his face, or even his voice, but she couldn’t do it. Like trying to remember a shadow, it was. She searched inside herself for something, anything, like rummaging through a drawer to find something she was sure she had left there. Where is it, why can’t I find it? This is your father who is gone forever, she thought. Then she said it out loud: “This is your father who is gone.” Why can’t you cry for him, imp of darkness, you?
She looked out the window. Just a few feet away, through another window, an old man was shuffling around his apartment in his underwear, his hair awry. She felt so sorry for him, yet she could not feel sorry for her own father.
Try harder. She closed her eyes, tried again to remember what he looked like. All that came to her was the foggy memory of a stern man in a yarmulke with a gray beard and a threadbare frock coat, telling her: “Send money when you can.”
She read the rest of the letter, more slowly this time: about his illness, about the funeral, how old their mutti looked since his sickness, gone to live with Zlota now. There was news about more people she couldn’t remember. And then, at the very last, how Yaakov wanted to come to America. Life in Tallinn was good now, she said, not like you remember, not like when we were girls. But how long can it last, Yaakov says. A madman on one border, a crazy man on the other.
If anything should happen to Mama, G
od forbid, he says maybe we should leave, before anything else bad happens.
She turned and stared out the window again. The sun was setting, and the tiny patch of sky that she could see between the rooftops was brushed with pink. At last she heard Libby’s footfall on the stairs.
Her beautiful daughter, she looked worn out. She wasn’t anymore the talking-back girl from the fancy school, no time for bobs and nice clothes from Saks anymore, just a day frock, and her hair damp with sweat and sticky on her forehead. But still something about her, still men looked, no matter how tired and how little she cared about what she put on.
She took off her hat and flopped down on a chair, flushed from the heat and the ride on the trolley bus, fanned herself with the newspaper. “Hello, Mama.”
“Bubeleh, you look all in. Are you all right?”
“Just so hot,” she said. “What have you got there?”
Sarah pushed the letter across the table. “It’s from Etta. My papa has died.”
“Oh, Mama. I’m so sorry!” Libby stood up, put her arms around her, read the letter over her shoulder. “Did you know he was sick?”
“None of us lives forever. But you know, it’s funny, I don’t feel anything. I should feel something—he was my father—but I don’t. So long since I have seen him, and, you know, we were never close.”
“But still. He was your papa.”
“He always used to look at us girls and say, ‘Why did God do this? No son to say Kaddish for me.’ That was only what we were to him, no Kaddish.”
Liberty hugged her tighter, standing behind her chair. Something was wrong, Sarah knew. It was not just the heat and a grandfather she never knew being dead. She looked up at her. There was something in her eyes; she was looking but not looking.
“Something has happened.”
“Nothing has happened, Mama.” Liberty turned away, went to the icebox, got some ice, and put it in a tea towel, then put it on the back of her neck to cool down. She stood by the window, hoping for some breeze. “What weather. The sun is almost down and still so hot.”
Loving Liberty Levine Page 22