by Susan Isaacs
“I don’t know, but—”
“Who do you know on the outside? Come on.”
“Well, my sister Elizabeth is a teacher.”
“Not family.”
“All right.”
“So?”
“Just a second. All right, there’s my friend Joan. We’ve been friends since fourth grade. She’s a housewife with two kids.”
“When was the last time you saw her?”
“New Year’s Day. But that’s not fair, Marcia, because we’ve been extra busy, and since Gresham died I’ve been—”
“When was the last time you saw her before New Year’s Day? Come on.”
Eileen examined her short but perfectly manicured nails. “The New Year’s Day before that. But what does that prove? If you worked for a newspaper you’d have lunch with journalists. And if you were a teacher, your best pal would be an academic.”
“But political people are the only people I know. I’ve been with them since college. I have nowhere else to go. God, the only man I ever slept with who wasn’t on or about to be on the public tit was Barry. Every other man was employed—”
“Marcia, be rational. There are men all over the city who have other jobs. Really. I’ve met them. You can too.”
“I don’t want to meet them. I have Jerry.”
“Let’s have dinner.”
We sat at the table, a circle of glass set on a truncated tree trunk. I peered through the glass, wondering whether Eileen had ever counted the age rings of the tree. Her apartment, a tight studio in an expensive cooperative building, was jammed full of objects that had nothing to do with each other. What’s her decorating concept? my Aunt Estelle would demand. Does she think it’s elegant to live in the middle of a rummage sale?
A Lucite footstool was pushed against the wall. Above it hung a Navajo blanket. Under the window, a line of green glass jars and ceramic pots were filled with pussy willows. The couch was as padded and prim as Queen Victoria at her Diamond Jubilee. Beside it, there was a rocking chair made of leather and chrome. But Eileen loved each of her objects; sitting at the table, she ran her hand around the rim of her cut crystal wineglass, over the surface of the ceramic salt and pepper shakers, shaped like black and white poodles.
“You said you have Jerry,” she said, “but you really can’t have him, not in any conventional sense. You need more than he can give you.”
“You sound like my family.”
“Well, maybe they have a point you should be listening to. You’re clinging to him because you need security, continuity. But Marcia, the minute he feels you’re depending on him too much, he’ll bolt.”
“That’s not true.”
“Of course it’s true. I know so many like him. Don’t you understand? To you he’s an exotic. To me—well, he’s just another good-looking Irish bachelor. I have an uncle just like him, and a couple of cousins too. The point is, they’re a type. I can predict exactly how Jerry will behave because I’ve seen the pattern dozens of times.”
“So?”
“So, they never marry. They pick up the scent of intimacy in the air and they run. Look, you can think the two of you are so close your lives have merged, but he won’t think the same way. My Uncle Bob saw the same woman for seventeen years. Seventeen! And one evening he just decided he’d rather be doing something else and he shook her hand and wished her a nice life.”
“I still don’t see the point.”
“Then you’re not looking. Maybe what your family wants for you isn’t so awful. They want to see you married because they want you protected, loved.”
“Let me tell you something, Eileen. In the twenty-one years I lived with her, my mother never told me she loved me. She never protected me; I would ask her permission to go someplace and she’d give me a wave of her hand and say, ‘Do whatever you want.’ She barely talked to me. I kept interrupting her reading. All my family cares about is that I do the correct thing: marry the right sort of man—rich, Jewish—have a couple of children, and be on a first-name basis with an interior decorator.”
“Well, at least your mother cares enough to want something for you. Anyway, if you look at it, none of their aspirations for you are intrinsically terrible.”
“They’re all superficial. There’s no love there.”
“You supply the love. Your family is just giving you the outline.”
“Look, my family is spiritually and emotionally deficient.”
“But you’re not.”
“The point is—”
“The point is, Marcia, that the Jerry Morrissey you’re defending may be spiritually and emotionally deficient too. He can’t give you—”
“The point is, Eileen, that I love him.”
“Well,” she said softly, spearing a potato puff with her fork, “that won’t admit to rational analysis, will it?”
But neither would anything else in my life. When I got home, I called my mother. She sounded pleased to hear from me. I sat on the bed, stunned.
“Marcia, I’m so glad you called.”
“Oh. Well, good. How are you, Mom?”
“Not too bad. I was going to call you.”
“What’s new?”
“Nothing much. What’s new with you?”
“Well, I’m working uptown now, at campaign headquarters. I’ll give you my number there.”
“I just spoke to Aunt Estelle.”
“That’s nice.”
“Well, it wasn’t so nice.”
“What happened?”
“Remember her next-door neighbor, Lydia Leventhal?”
“No.”
“You know her. Well, her husband passed away yesterday afternoon. Lung cancer. Inoperable. They opened him and sewed him right back up.”
“I’m sorry to hear that. Anything else new?”
“No. In any case, Marcia, I discussed it with Aunt Estelle and she thinks it would be nice if you went with us to pay a shiva call.”
“Look, Mom, that’s out of the question. Completely out of the question. I’m swamped at headquarters, and I don’t even know Mrs. Lowenstein.”
“Leventhal. Of course you know her. She’s lived next door to Julius and Estelle for over twenty years. In the English Tudor house with the wrought-iron bench in the front. And,” she continued, speaking with a verve she generally reserved for the Rothschilds, “I know how much it would mean to Uncle Julius if you came. He says Mr. Leventhal was very active in politics, so it could be worthwhile for you to show up.” I could pass out Paterno for Governor buttons. “Uncle Julius says the Leventhals always thought highly of you.”
“What was his first name?”
“Mr. Leventhal’s? Ira. He was a very fine man. An attorney.”
“Never heard of him. He probably just belonged to the local club in Jamaica Estates and—”
“No. He was very important, according to Uncle Julius.”
“Uncle Julius may know mink, but he doesn’t know beans about politics. Listen, Paterno’s from Queens, and if someone’s a big Democrat I know who they are. No Ira Leventhal was ever a factor.”
My mother’s voice remained calm and took on pearly, cultured overtones. “Mr. Leventhal was a Republican, Marcia. A very fine man. He always dressed in three-piece suits. But I can’t force you to pay a condolence call. If you don’t want to go because he belonged to another political party, that’s entirely up to you.”
“It has nothing to do with that. It’s just that I’m so swamped.”
“Sometimes I don’t understand you.”
“What?”
“You’re liberal enough to mingle with all sorts of people, but for a Republican—”
“Look, I like Republicans. Okay? They’re wonderful. My second favorite political party.”
“All right, Marcia. I’ll let you get your sleep.”
“All right, I’ll go to Mrs. Leventhal’s. I’m not sure which night I can make it, though.”
“Aunt Estelle wanted you to come tomorrow night
for dinner. If you and”—pause, swallow—“your friend don’t have plans. Not that he needs to come. I mean, since he didn’t know the Leventhals, it wouldn’t be appropriate.”
“Too bad. He loves Jewish mourning practices.”
“All right, Marcia. Forget the whole thing.”
“Stop it. I was joking. Look, he’s out of town anyway.”
“Oh.”
“I’ll go. I’ll meet you at Aunt Estelle’s tomorrow night.”
“I’m sure Mrs. Leventhal will appreciate it.” She paused. “And the rest of her family.”
“How many Leventhals are there?”
“Just the son, Butch. Aunt Estelle says he’s probably shattered, first with his divorce, now with his father’s death.”
“Mom.”
My mother was no fool. “I’ll meet you at six at Aunt Estelle’s. She asked that you don’t wear slacks. It’s inappropriate, and you have a tendency to be bottom-heavy.” Then she got off the phone fast.
Ten
Who puts dill into lentil soup?” my Aunt Estelle demanded.
“I do,” I said, sprinkling a spoonful of the herb into my aunt’s soup pot. It was large enough for Macbeth’s witches. “It’s nice. Adds a kind of Russian flavor.”
“Who wants Russian flavor? All they know is beets.”
“They know more than beets.”
“All right. Cabbage too.” She supervised my peppering the soup. “Not too much. Uncle Julius doesn’t like things too spicy.”
I had left work early, mainly to escape Lyle LoBello. He had sauntered into my office, leaned against a wall Bogart-fashion, and murmured, “How’re you getting through the nights, little Marcia?”
“Do you use parsley?” I asked my aunt.
“Of course I use parsley. What do you think, I’m one of those old-fashioned Jewish cooks who only knows onions and garlic?” She retreated from the stove and sat at her kitchen table, where she began to peel a small pyramid of potatoes. “Do you get to do much cooking in Greenwich Village?” she inquired.
“No. I don’t think I’ve ever even opened the oven there.”
“Really?”
“Well, by the time I get home, six-seven at night, I’m really too tired to cook.”
“And your friend doesn’t cook?”
“No.”
“I asked because men are cooking these days. Barbara says Philip makes bread. Can you imagine that? And he doesn’t even have to, with a cook. You wouldn’t believe what kind of a salary that woman gets. And that’s including two days off a week and sometimes they just have a plain steak and baked potato for dinner. Not that she’s not a fine cook. She used to work for the Whitneys, but they never made her feel part of the family, the way Barbara does. She’s colored, you know.”
“Black.”
“So he doesn’t like to cook?”
“Who? Oh, Jerry. No.”
“Well, they’re not exactly experts when it comes to food.”
“Come on, Aunt Estelle.”
“All right, he’s a great gourmet.”
“Actually, you’re right. He eats things like luncheon meat. You know, those squares of bologna with sliced olives and things stuck in them.”
“I’ve seen them in the supermarket. I always wondered who bought that chozzerai. Does he make you eat it?”
“No. Of course not. Look, he’s a lovely, civilized person, Aunt Estelle. What do you think, he ties me to a chair and forces me to eat luncheon meat? I don’t want to start another argument when my mother and Uncle Julius are here, but if you’d just give him a chance, I think you’d like him. He’s bright, handsome—”
“Of course he’s handsome. You ever go past a firehouse? They’re all Irish, and one after another they look like movie stars. It’s like Errol Flynn coming over and squirting a hose in your window.”
“Aunt Estelle, if you’d—”
“Marcia, has he asked to come here? Has he said to you, ‘Please introduce me to your family’? Well?”
“No.”
“And he’s not going to. Don’t give me one of your looks. I’m just being realistic. You share the same apartment, share the same telephone and everything else, why should he want to meet your family? Things are perfect for him just the way they are. If he started coming here, it would add a whole new aspect to your relationship, and let me tell you something, he doesn’t want that any more than we do.”
I covered the soup pot and sat across from my aunt.
“You’re not fighting me because you know what I’m saying is true,” she said.
“But he’s the only person who ever made me happy. Doesn’t that count for anything?”
“It counts if you can count on him. Barbara looks across the dinner table and sees Philip, sees a husband, someone who’ll be there ten-twenty years from now.”
“Well, I was married.”
“Marcia, please.”
“Well, I was. You all approved of Barry. You all thought he was a brilliant catch. But he didn’t make me happy. I couldn’t count on him. Look, it’s more than ten years and I look across the dinner table and he’s not there.”
“Marcia, darling, I’m not saying every husband is right for every wife. Maybe we were wrong in thinking he was such a catch. Who knows? I met his mother at Loehmann’s a couple of months ago. That Sheri, that phony. Everyone knows her name is Sadie. I took a good look at her. And you know what? Beneath that surface polish, there’s no real refinement. She wears costume jewelry earrings and has that hard cigarette voice. You know what I mean? She may set a nice table, but she’s one tough cookie. By the way, she told me Barry’s wife is pregnant with twins, but I got the impression things weren’t going too well with them. Here, take the potatoes and cut them into very thin slices. No, that’s too thin.”
My Aunt Estelle made me crazy, but she helped me keep my sanity. In the years after my father died, when my mother drifted around the apartment like someone half dead, it was my aunt, with her nagging and nosiness and nearly intolerable manipulativeness, who gave me the feeling I was alive and worth fussing over.
Some major human component was missing in my mother. She echoed her sister’s prejudices, snobberies, and idiocies, but she had none of my aunt’s compensating vigor, competence, and charisma.
My mother would never attempt to browbeat me over a pot of lentil soup. She didn’t care enough. Something had happened to her. In her universe, where smothering mothers were considered merely devoted, she never questioned where I was going, what I was doing, or with whom I was doing it. She never even bought me a birthday present, but instead gave me two or five or ten dollars to buy my own gift. Her loyalties remained with her own family, with her sister; she had no maternal feelings. But at least she cared enough to offer me up as a human sacrifice to my Aunt Estelle. My aunt then told her what to do: “Hilda, Marcia needs new shoes,” or “If she’s having dinner at the Plotnicks’, let her bring flowers. Candy is too lower class.” My mother would nod, and I’d get new shoes or money for a bouquet of flowers.
When I came up to New York to tell my family I had left Barry, my mother paled and shrugged. My aunt shrieked, demanded smelling salts, and spent an entire three days—until I fled back to Washington—trying to discover what had happened. “What’s wrong, darling?” she had said. “He’s not paying enough attention to you? He’s fooling around a little? He didn’t hit you, did he? Marcia, listen to me. Give him another chance. He’ll come to his senses. You don’t throw out a husband like he was an old crust of bread.” But at least she ensconced me in Barbara’s old bedroom and donated three days of her life to tormenting me. My mother had gone home by nine fifteen the first night, saying she didn’t like taking the subway after ten o’clock.
“Go get a pot of cold water,” my aunt said. “Put the potatoes in after you peel them and they won’t turn gray. That’s from the starch.”
My aunt loved to run things. She had taken charge of her daughter’s life and turned Barbara into a woma
n so showered by blessings that other mothers might have blushed at the audacity of accepting such good fortune. Aunt Estelle felt her success with Barbara was merely the result of planning and hard work. She had not done as well with her son, Kenny, but then she hadn’t tried very hard. Kenny was nervous and inarticulate and hadn’t interested her too much, so she only bothered getting him through Yale and M.I.T. He showed no interest in fine English worsteds or girls, but my aunt was able to ignore these defects because he lived out of town.
I could never understand why my aunt wasn’t president of General Motors or chairman of the Federal Reserve. There was no doubt that she could have governed New York City; she was smarter than the mayor, more resourceful than the comptroller, more energetic than Paterno. Mere sexism could not have kept her in the kitchen. She was so formidable that I could not imagine anyone stupid or courageous enough to try and discriminate against her.
But she limited her sphere of influence to Jamaica Estates. There, she was queen. And had I been willing to accept her patronage, she would have ruled my life completely, taking me to her manicurist for porcelain nails, arranging dates for me with orthodontists and restaurateurs and third-generation garment-center moguls. She would have redecorated Barbara’s allwhite bedroom in pearly beiges suitable for a thirty-five-year-old career girl and laid out my clothes for me each night.
“Do you ever speak to him?” she asked.
“To whom?”
“I’m glad to see you’re still grammatical. To Barry. I mean, he’s living in Philadelphia, so I thought you might have been in touch.”
“No. I have nothing to say to him. Why should I be in touch?”
“I’m not saying you should. I was just wondering. He never called you?”
“No.”
“I hear his wife comes from a very impressive family. On the Main Line.”
“Come on, Aunt Estelle. Their name is Goldfarb or Goldblatt or something.”
“You don’t think there are Jews on the Main Line?” She finished her last potato and wrapped the peels in a paper towel to throw into the garbage. “Grandma Yetta used to save the peels. She used them to thicken soups and gravies.”
“Was Grandma Yetta from the Main Line?”