How to Fall

by Edith Pearlman

  A pier glass stood between the two bedroom windows. She walked slowly toward it.

  What a distinguished gentleman. How well the white-haired head sat above the fur collar. The owner of this coat must be a slender fellow—the garment barely skimmed Sonya’s thin frame. A man like this had had the cash to get out of Vienna, then get out of Paris, then get to New York—not like the little shoemaker Yenkel and his numerous children, not like chess-playing Claud, smoking and coughing on his lower bunk . . .

  She took off the coat and brought it into the living room. Roland was awake. She showed him the garment like a saleslady, displaying the fine workmanship of the buttoned right cuff. The other cuff, she discovered, had lost its button.

  “Very nice, but no use in California,” said Roland. “So she left it in New York.”

  “He.”

  “He, I suppose. We might have figured. A woman irons.” There’d been no ironing board when they arrived; they’d had to buy one. “A woman would have chosen different draperies—a softer color. Yes: this is a man’s apartment.”

  “There’s no spice rack above the stove,” Sonya said. Roland gave her a thoughtful look. She turned from him and laid the coat at an angle on the Biedermeier sofa, its shoulders against the strict back, its skirts spread on the seat.

  “But the photographs,” Roland said suddenly.

  “Oh, your first guess must have been right.” She turned from the coat and walked back to Roland. “The pictures of that pretty family were taken by the coat’s owner, our landlord, the beloved young uncle.”

  “No longer young,” he sighed.

  “Still beloved,” and she touched his arm.

  She took the coat to the neighborhood yarn shop—its missing button preyed on her conscience like a hungry pet. “Can you match this?” Sonya handed the buttoned right sleeve to the woman on the other side of the counter. The rest of the coat remained in her protective embrace.

  “Ach, you don’t meet such buttons any more. May I see the others?” Without waiting for permission the woman leaned forward and grasped the coat under the arms and took it from Sonya and laid it on the counter. She examined the carved leather hemispheres on the breast. She raised little green eyes to Sonya’s. “We have nothing like this here. I would not know where to look, though in Budapest . . .” and she trailed off sentimentally. “But maybe!” She thrust her ringed hand into the coat’s pocket, a pocket that Sonya had not guessed was there, so flat it was, so cleverly disguised by the seam. “Ach,” she said again. “He knew it was loose, ripped it off, kept it safe.”

  “Who?”

  “Your employer.” Sonya had pulled on an old cardigan sweater against the October chill. She supposed she did look like a housekeeper. “A tailor should sew this on; don’t try it yourself.”

  The tailor on University Place did the job while she waited. A sudden wind swept newspapers against the shop’s grimy window. Once outside Sonya noticed that the temperature had dropped. So she put on the coat.

  Only three blocks to home—one westwards, two north. She was moving like a chess knight. No, a king. No, no, how self-important—minor nobility.

  Roland wasn’t yet home. So she let the coat sit in his chair until, after five, the elevator began swishing up and down. Then she stowed it.

  The next afternoon it kept her company in the kitchen while she cooked.

  Another afternoon, while she lay on the bed reading, the coat slumped on a rosé chaise.

  She did not wear it again until after the Christmas holidays. Then there was a cold snap. Her own coat was warm, yes; but would not the old gentleman’s be warmer still?—its lining, unseen between silk and wool, was light yet effective. When she held the fabric between thumb and fingers something slid within, as if alive.

  She bought it a scarf—not real silk, something synthetic, oh, these new fabrics. The color was perfect—cognac. She bought cashmere-lined leather gloves on sale. In a thrift shop she found a hat in the shape of a squat cylinder, mink-dyed squirrel.

  Her daily walks became longer. She began on Fifth, turned onto Broadway at Union Square, stayed on its sunny side. In half an hour she was among the émigrés. She would not enter the cafeterias, where forgotten journalists argued all afternoon. But there was a café run by a sly man with a twirled mustache, and that place she did patronize. He was Bulgarian, she thought—her work at Camp Gruenwasser had made her adept at guessing nationalities. At the Bulgarian’s were newspapers, chess games, waiters in discolored white jackets. Soon Sonya had her own table by the window, and she could order her omelet by raising an index finger. The coat lay on its side across the other chair. Hat and gloves and scarf nestled under the sleeping arm. Keys and wallet reposed in her trousers.

  She went to art gallery openings. The openings were free, as was the champagne and canapés. She went to noontime concerts in churches, also free, though lacking refreshments. Warmly she stood in the unimproved area behind the Library, and fed pigeons. She went to a Saturday morning service at a Reform Temple—Roland always slept late on weekends. She went to a big Conservative Synagogue. She went to an old shul, and sat downstairs.

  She did not think of the coat as lawfully hers, oh, no. But in its illicit protection she became a personage. Immigrant men hoping to adapt to the New World were buying fedoras and secondhand broad-shouldered suits. Unwittingly they looked like gangsters. In print dresses their wives resembled charladies. Sonya, American by birth, graduate of a teacher’s college and an accounting course, never out of the country until she was past fifty... Sonya was preserving the Old World of ringstrasses, universities, coffeehouses, salons, museums, bunds and diets and Parliaments and banks. She walked and walked. Truck drivers shouted coarse phrases to one another. Shopgirls out for lunch wore glistening lipstick. Sometimes she paused at a department store window and bowed at her reflection.

  One March Wednesday she went to a student recital at a private school. It was an Episcopalian establishment, but some German-Jewish families had been sending children there for a few generations. The school occupied a block of brownstones whose shared walls had been removed, so that behind the burghers’ façade was a surprising interior: hallways hung with kindergarten art, an aquarium, the buzz of hopeful activity. A little auditorium was embedded within the whole. Sonya found a seat in the middle of a middle row. She saw from the program that she was to be treated to recitations, musical performances, a ballet . . .

  “Your grandchild is performing?” said the person next to her: a hammered pageboy under a beret, a badly reconstructed nose.

  “Yes . . . she will dance.”

  “Ah,” slightly friendly. “What is her name?” slightly interested.

  “She is my daughter’s child,” said the barren Sonya. “My name is...”

  The headmaster mounted the stairs to the stage, and Sonya’s neighbor turned her worshipful gaze toward him, so Sonya had to be content with the botched rhinoplasty of the profile.

  “. . . Gruenwasser,” she finished.

  But the woman was no longer listening. Who wanted to listen to a refugee from God knows where. Delicate voices on the stage were singing Stephen Foster. The children’s chorus at the Camp had managed Berlioz; well, they’d been directed by a once notable baritone from Dresden. He was in Argentina now. She wondered how he was faring among the gauchos.

  The recital ended. Half an hour later, stepping out of the elevator, Sonya heard the telephone ringing in the apartment.

  “Mrs. Rosenberg? This is Dr. Katz at the Montefiore hospital . . .” She threw keys and wallet onto the telephone table. “. . . has sustained a heart attack, he’s very much alive . . .” She unbuttoned the coat and allowed it to drop to the floor. “. . . and conscious. His condition is stable . . .” She stepped away from the fallen coat, kicked it, got the room number, hung up, grabbed her raincoat from the closet—really, spring had come at last—and retrieved wallet and keys from the table. She snatched up the square of challis Roland had given her for her
birthday—paisley, it was all the rage. She ran down the five flights of stairs and hailed a taxi. In the cab she tied the paisley under her chin.

  “Thank you for coming.”

  “Thank you for inviting us.” Where should they sit, Sonya wondered. She watched Roland settle himself in his customary chair, and so she took her own. Their hostess sat at ease on the sofa.

  She was not the curly daughter, she was the one with full lips. The lips were still full—she could not be more than thirty-five, after all—and the long hair was still blonde. On the telephone: “I want to meet you,” she said in a husky voice that she must have been told many times was irresistible; well, maybe it was irresistible; they hadn’t resisted. “You left me a nicer apartment than the one I left you,” she’d gone on. “Nothing out of place; and those improvements!” The spice rack, Sonya supposed; the ironing board, a chair leg that no longer wobbled, added plants . . . the button? “Besides,” she’d chuckled. “You forgot your tuxedo.”

  Now Madame Schumacher—“Can’t I be Erika?”—poured generous tots of sherry. “You’re living on the West Side?”

  In their building the elevator always clanged. They had no second bedroom. On Roland’s bad nights he sat up reading and Sonya slept on the living room couch. There she dreamed of London and the bombs. But the place caught afternoon sun. They had purchased cotton rugs and secondhand furniture. Then they had splurged on a Finnish chest painted with stylized flowers. They used it as a coffee table.

  “The West Side, yes,” said Sonya.

  “An easy bus ride to Carnegie Hall,” said Roland; and so they talked of music, and of the Mayor, and of films.

  “Were you in Hollywood?” Sonya asked. Direct questions were not her habit; but she was a quarter-century older than this beautiful woman; and her navy shirtwaist gave her the modest authority of a nanny. She had abandoned the Mary Martin hairstyle; her straight white hair just grazed the shirtwaist’s collar.

  “The whole family is in the movie business, none of us in front of the camera. I did some translations, this and that . . . I was divorcing when I left New York and I am thoroughly divorced now.” She gave a graceful shudder. Her accent was light, not at all guttural, just a sometime transposition of Ws and Vs, as in ‘diworced.’ The sisters had all learned English from their tutor, she said; and she, Erika, had worked on French during a summer spent with an aunt, such a beautiful apartment, you could see the Seine. Sonya thought of the ailing Paris, the oily river, the bridge.

  More conversation, then silence. They would not see each other again: the woman-of-the world, the pair of pensioners. When Sonya and Roland got up to say good-bye, Erika stood also and left the room and came back with the tuxedo over her arm. “I didn’t notice it when I first came home; it was hiding behind Franz’s old coat.”

  “Oh Yes The Coat,” said Sonya.

  “My ex-husband’s. I kept it out of malice, he loved it so. I think I’ll give it to the Writers and Artists Thrift Shop.”

  “Our organization distributes clothing to the needy.”

  “I’ll remember that,” said Erika. She’d forget it before the elevator reached the lobby.

  On the sidewalk, Roland pointed to the tuxedo, which Sonya carried over her arm. “I’ll never wear that thing again.”

  “Who knows? ‘With proper care you can live another twenty years,’” quoting his doctor.

  “Proper care does not include after-dinner speeches in a monkey suit.”

  “Yes, well.” And the coat, the coat . . .

  “The tuxedo . . . will do for a shroud.”

  . . . the coat: she would haunt the Writers and Artists Thrift Shop until the thing appeared. She’d buy it and stash it in the Finnish chest; maybe in that relic the Old World would find repose. And if not, let it writhe. Love, love... “A shroud? Up yours,” snorted Sonya, startling him, making him smile. “I intend to keep you around. Darling, let’s have dinner out.”

  She took his arm and led him to a new Italian place on East Twelfth, one which the courtly old gentleman in the fur-collared coat had never had a chance to patronize.

  The Story

  Predictably,” said Judith da Costa.

  “Oh . . . hopeful,” said her husband Justin in his determinedly tolerant way.

  “Neither,” said Harry Savitsky, not looking for trouble exactly; looking for engagement perhaps; really looking for the door, but the evening had just begun.

  Harry’s wife Lucienne—uncharacteristically—said nothing. She was listening to the tune: a mournful bit from Smetana.

  What these four diners were evaluating was a violinist, partly his performance, partly his presence. The new restaurant—Harry and Lucienne had suggested it—called itself The Hussar, and presented piroshki and goulash in a gypsy atmosphere. The chef was rumored to be twenty-six years old. The Hussar was taking a big chance on the chef, on the fiddler, on the location, and apparently on the help; one busboy had already dropped a pitcher of water.

  “It’s tense here, in the dining room,” Judith remarked.

  “In the kitchen—don’t ask,” said Harry.

  In some accommodating neighborhood in Paris, a restaurant like The Hussar might catch on. In Paris . . . but this was not Paris. It was Godolphin, a town that was really a western wedge of Boston; Godolphin, home to Harry and Lucienne Savitsky, retired high-school teachers; Godolphin, not so much out of fashion as beyond its reach.

  One might say the same of Harry. His preferred haberdashery was the Army/Navy surplus store downtown. Lucienne, however, was genuinely Parisian (she had spent the first four years of her life there, never mind that the city was Occupied, never mind that she was hardly ever taken out of the apartment) and she had a Frenchwoman’s flair for color and line. As a schoolgirl in Buenos Aires, as a young working woman in nineteen-fifties Boston, she had been known for dressing well on very little money; and she and her brother had managed to support their widowed mother, too. But Lucienne was well over sixty now, and perhaps this turquoise dress she’d bought for a friend’s grandson’s bar mitzvah was too bright for the present company. Perhaps it was also too tight for what Lucienne called her few extra pounds and Harry called her blessed corpulence. He was a fatty himself.

  In the da Costas’ disciplined presence Harry was always a little embarrassed about their appetites, his and Lucienne’s. Certainly they had nothing else to be ashamed of: not a thing! They were well-educated, as high-school teachers had had to be in their day (she’d taught French, he chemistry). Lucienne spoke three languages, four if you counted Yiddish. Harry conversed only in Brooklyn English, but he understood Lucienne in all of her tongues. They subscribed to The New Yorker and Science and American Heritage.

  These da Costas, though—they were very tall, they were very thin. Judith with her pewter hair and dark clothing could have passed for a British governess. Justin was equally daunting: a high brow, and a lean nose, and thin lips always forming meaningful expressions. But there were moments when Justin glanced at Judith while speaking, and a spasm of anxiety crossed his face, getting entangled with the meaningful expressions. Then Justin and Harry briefly became allies: two younger brothers who’d been caught smoking. One morning at breakfast Harry had described this occasional feeling of kinship to his wife. Lucienne looked at him for a while, then got up and went around the table and kissed him.

  Paprika breadsticks! The waiter’s young hand shook as he lowered the basket. Judith took none; Justin took one but didn’t bite; Lucienne took one and began to munch; Harry took one and then parked another behind his ear.

  “Ha,” said Judith mirthlessly.

  “Ha ha,” said Justin.

  Lucienne looked at Harry, and sighed, and smiled—her wide motherly smile, reminding him of the purpose of this annual evening out. He removed the breadstick, brushing possible crumbs from his shoulder. “What do you hear from our kids?” he said to Justin.

  “Our kids love it out there in Santa Fe. I don’t share their taste for the high a
nd dry,” Justin said with an elegant shrug.

  “You’re a Yankee from way back,” said Harry.

  The da Costas, as Harry well knew, were an old Portuguese-Dutch family who had begun assimilating the minute they arrived in the New World—in 1800, something like that—and had intermarried whenever an Episcopalian would have them. Fifty years ago Justin studied medicine for the purpose of learning psychiatry. His practice still flourished. He saw patients in a freestanding office, previously a stable, behind their home, previously a farmhouse, the whole compound fifteen miles north of Boston. Judith had designed all the conversions. The windows of Justin’s consulting room faced a soothing stand of birches.

  The Savitskys had visited the da Costas once, three years ago, the night before Miriam Savitsky’s wedding to Jotham da Costa. At that party they discovered that there were back yards in Greater Boston through which rabbits ran, into which deer tripped; that people in the mental health professions did not drink hard liquor (Justin managed to unearth a bottle of Scotch from a recess under the sink); and that the severe Judith was the daughter of a New Jersey pharmacist. The pharmacist was there on the lawn, in a deck chair: aged and garrulous. Harry and his new son-in-law’s grandfather talked for a while about synthetic serotonin. The old man had died last winter.

  Cocktails! The Hussar did provide Scotch, perhaps knowing no better. The fiddler’s repertoire descended into the folk—some Russian melodies. Harry guessed that Lucienne knew their Yiddish lyrics. The da Costas ignored the tunes. They were devotees of Early Music. To give them their due—and Harry always tried to give them their due—they perhaps did not intend to convey the impression that dining out once a year with the Savitskys was bearable, but only marginally. Have pity, he told himself. Their cosseted coexistence with gentle wildlife must make them uncomfortable with extremes of color, noise, and opinions. And for their underweight Jotham, who still suffered from acne at the age of thirty-seven, they’d probably wanted somebody other than a wide-hipped, dense-haired lawyer with a loud laugh.