The First Desire

by Nancy Reisman

  White sheets. Orderly corners. Clean quilt. No books, though Goldie reads voraciously and leaves books everywhere. No handwriting anywhere, no note of course, nothing hidden in with the shoes. It’s the shoes that seem strangest to Sadie. She picks one up, slides her foot out of her own shoe and into Goldie’s, which is slightly wider and longer, thicker-soled, hardly dainty. There is no feeling of Goldie in it, Sadie thinks. There ought to be.

  Celia is upstairs now, pacing, her steps clunky and distinct, and beyond Goldie’s bedroom door there’s a series of meows, at first clearly the cat’s and then what must be Celia mewing back. Sadie slips her own shoe on and pulls the door open to the hall, where Irving is leaning against the door frame, rolling a small glass marble back and forth over his palm.

  “Is there anything else you can think of?” Sadie says.

  “I don’t know,” Celia says. “No. I don’t think so. No.”

  Irving shrugs.

  “You’ve talked to police?” Sadie says. But of course they have not.

  FINE, THEN, a cigarette. Sadie would like one and will have one, and her husband when he smells it on her clothes will simply have to keep mum. She sits in the front parlor and lights a cigarette and Celia has one too, identical lipstick marks on white paper—when did Celia manage to get Sadie’s lipstick out of her handbag? Irving sinks into the sofa, toying with a pipe. They smoke and gaze at the piano, which is mahogany and silent and in need of dusting. She does not think of Niagara Falls. She makes a list: Jo, Papa, library, hospitals, police, newspapers. Irving says their father knows nothing and though Irving is often unreliable, in this instance he is probably right. Sadie herself is more likely to know Goldie’s secrets, if in fact Goldie has secrets, or had secrets—given the possibility that she’s dead, which is jumping to conclusions, which Sadie mustn’t do. Someone has misplaced the ashtray, and she needs to ash her cigarette. It seems that if Goldie were in the house, the ashtray would be apparent, the piano keys dusted and covered, or, better, played. Celia would not smoke: she doesn’t when Goldie is around, and it’s probably better that way, given Celia’s vast ability to forget.

  BY THE TIME Sadie leaves the house, the air outside has warmed and thickened, the breeze has dropped, and the sun is too hot, glinting off the Ford and forcing her to squint. Sadie drives south and east, downtown to the offices of Schumacher, Stein & Dobkin. On the second floor, beyond the gold-stenciled glass door and the small, formal reception area, her sister Jo hunches over her typewriter in the posture of a crabbed old woman. Jo is not an old woman, she’s in her mid-twenties and she’d be attractive if she cared—gold-flecked hazel eyes, a delicate face. Her loveliness surfaces when it seems she doesn’t know you’re there. The moment the receptionist greets Sadie—an overly solicitous “How are you today?”—Jo glances up from the secretarial pool, and her face closes.

  “What do you know,” Jo says.

  Sadie calls past the receptionist, “Can you take a break?”

  Jo waves her back to the secretarial pool—now abandoned for lunch—and seats Sadie at an empty desk. “I don’t have much to tell you,” Jo says, as if Sadie has posed the real question. “She just stopped coming home. I thought she was scratching an itch.”

  Sadie imagines Celia’s cat then—all that leg rubbing and mewing. Pictures dogs in the park. Jo’s conversation always seems so unsavory. “What itch?”

  “How would I know?” Jo looks as if she’s sucking a lemon, and there’s something stunned about her, something Sadie didn’t notice at first, a slight tremor in her hands, which Jo attempts to hide, holding one hand over the other, rubbing her fingers as if to make them stop.

  “I’m not saying you would,” Sadie says, but this seems a portal to their regular squabbling, she doesn’t want to go this way: they can accuse each other of nothing for hours. “What do you think we should do?”

  At this Jo eases back. She doesn’t know, though it’s clear their father will not act; he hasn’t even called Moshe Schumacher, her boss, and—like it or not—his closest friend. At the moment Moshe Schumacher is in court, but when he gets back, Jo will talk to him. He knows a lot of people, Jo says, police captains and such.

  “Good. Thank you,” Sadie says. This seems to have no softening effect. “What about last week?”

  Jo shakes her head, and the sour look appears and recedes. If she knows more about Goldie’s disappearance, she’s convincing in her lies.

  “How about last Monday?” Sadie asks. “Tuesday?”

  There’s a tiny twitch below Jo’s left eye when Sadie gets to Wednesday, but Jo says, “Nothing special,” and presses her lips together.

  IT’S NO BETTER with their father. Sadie’s sweating below the jewelry store’s ceiling fan, while at the main display case he shows engagement rings to a plump businessman. This is not the sort of conversation one interrupts, although in truth her father has no conversations one should interrupt. She idles at a smaller display case—lockets and bracelets—and watches him behave as he always does with customers, solicitous and patient (more serious with men, more charming with women). He seems no different than he did two weeks ago: it’s as if Goldie has merely stormed off to the neighbor’s, as she did once when she was fifteen. And for a moment this vision seems plausible. But her father behaved the same way through their mother’s last months and barely averted collapse.

  She waits until he’s made the sale. Kisses him on the cheek, and he blinks, as if he’s suddenly remembered his life, the strangeness and shock of being a man with a family.

  “Papa, what happened with Goldie?” she says.

  “We did not have words.”

  “But what happened?”

  “This is not like her.” And then he’s tight-jawed and silent and it’s clear that he’s taken Goldie’s absence as an affront. On the far counter, black-and-white lists—inventory sheets—fan out, dropping angled shadows over the pearls. He’s checking, then, to see if Goldie’s taken anything; or is it to tally up how much, without her, he’s got left?

  From the jewelry store Sadie telephones her husband’s office, but Bill is with a patient and he’s booked all afternoon. She leaves a message with his secretary: a family matter has come up, today’s plans have changed. The store’s back office seems cooler than the front, but the air is still close, and while her father and Irving call out inventory numbers, Sadie swallows a quietly rising hysteria. Here is her compact. Here is her lipstick.

  She drives over to the central police precinct, the day still hot, though high clouds have moved in from the lake, and with them a light breeze: the city is oblivious to anything but summer. She makes the report to the police alone, all the while thinking Wait, as if waiting means Goldie will reappear in another day, or two days. The look the officer gives her says the same thing: wait.

  He’s in his early twenties, no older than she is: young to be so matter-of-fact. “Women do all sorts of things,” he says.

  “What do you mean?” Sadie says, but he shrugs, as if he’s already forgotten what he’s suggesting.

  “She’s old-fashioned,” Sadie says. “Old country.” Which is both true and untrue: born in Russia, sure, and unstylish in her dress, but there’s that whiff of socialism.

  Sadie offers up a photograph, attempts charm. It’s Goldie posed straight-backed on a garden bench, gaze direct and luminous. “She liked to visit the Falls. She might have. My brother says she’d have taken a trolley, she’d do that sometimes.”

  The officer nods and promises to check with Niagara Falls police—he is not unkind—but by any chance could Mrs. Feldstein’s sister have gone to Canada?

  To get a better look at the Falls? Not likely, Sadie thinks, not impossible, but that isn’t what he means, is it? There’s a blank second—she’s at a loss, though she knows the question is hiding something—and then the words tilt and she can see behind them the suggestion of rum-running. “I can’t imagine why,” Sadie says.

  “No? Well, river agents haven’t mentio
ned a woman.”

  “Of course not.” She’s a badly dressed librarian. Isn’t she?

  Sadie leaves the precinct angry enough to be calm, and stops at the downtown hospitals, shows one nurse after another the photo of Goldie on the garden bench. In the late afternoon she places newspaper classifieds in the Courier and the Buffalo Evening News and the Jewish Review.

  Missing: woman, 33 years old, of Jewish descent, 5’2”, dark hair and eyes, slim, last seen Sunday or Monday, possibly wearing a blue shirtwaist. May have visited Niagara Falls.

  It is almost five o’clock and she has not eaten today. She returns to her own house, where the lawn, the maples and petunias uphold July and the geraniums wait for their window box. She tries Bill’s office again, then takes off her shoes and lies down on the aqua sofa in her clothes. Tomorrow, or maybe sooner, she’ll have to go back to Lancaster, but the new sofa is soft, the fabric slightly cool, the desire to sleep irresistible. It occurs to Sadie that if Goldie is in Canada, she could be in a hotel room—maybe in a bed as lovely as this sofa—sleeping off the family. It also occurs to Sadie, this time without glee, that she must cancel dinner, that her mother-in-law will be unhappy and will not disguise her displeasure.

  When Sadie’s husband, Bill, wakes her, in that first moment it’s just the end of a nap—she’s forgotten everything but the drifting— there’s simply Bill waking her: light reflecting off his glasses, a scent of soap and musk, his palm on her arm, his palm on her cheek. There are his lips, a darkened pink, and she kisses him, there’s a sweet warmth to kissing him: she would like him to lie beside her now, she would like to lean her head against his chest and listen to his heartbeat and doze for a while and kiss him again. And then she remembers. It’s six o’clock, early for him. In the next instant she anticipates an answer—he must have news—but he does not, only that he’ll talk to the police himself, only that there’s no word from the hospitals. He’s home and Let’s not worry about dinner, or his mother. He spoke with Jo. Celia is fine. They will be fine, he says, and with such authority that Sadie nods in agreement. But as she sits up, she notices her conversation with Irving still hangs over the dining table, anything but fine. And she wonders how the day would have unfolded had she not opened the curtains or let him in. Would this house, at least, be untainted? She blinks, and there is within her a welling desire to erase the day, or at least to air the rooms of the conversation with Irving, and clean them, and launder the clothes she’s worn since morning. To bathe and begin again with an unsullied dress.

  CHAPTER 2

  Jo

  JULY 1929

  The newspapers love girl bandits, and so does Jo: she tries to get to the dailies before her father, who will take too much time and then toss them out. It’s better if she can escape to her room with the Evening News or the Courier—or if she’s lucky a paper from New York—and read the latest story: a bobbed redhead in New York, only seventeen, breaking in on a poker game; a young brunette holding up a jeweler in the Bronx; a college coed robbing a bank in Buda, Texas. They seem brazen, undaunted, these girls. Over days Jo follows their unraveling fates: they sometimes find leniency and sometimes are stuck, sentenced as harshly as men, and then disappear from the papers altogether. Other news bores her, and when girl bandits are absent from the paper, she drifts off instead, continuing in her mind old stories of women and guns and of other places she might live: her own flat, maybe near the Hippodrome— or better, a Hippodrome in another city—so she might go to the pictures whenever she likes. She imagines a pearl-handled revolver, smooth and cool to the touch, imagines herself downtown, disguised as a cabbie, talking only to shopgirls and the vendor in the theater ticket booth, planning the daring rescue of a gun girl in need, maybe even the Bobbed Bandit (still wearing her trial dress and bright orange stockings, a hat woven through with roses). It starts at the eleventh hour: the sentencing has not yet occurred, and the Bobbed Bandit is quick and feline and scared. Here is Jo, whisking her upstate and west, offering her protection and disguise—blue stockings, gardenias. Or for a less elaborate scheme, there’s the story of the girl once arrested in Buffalo who called herself Vera La Mont. Here’s Vera in the blue stockings, a white gardenia tucked into her hair, lounging in a darkened corner of the theater, Jo as the usher, the theater manager, the favorite companion.

  These are stories in which she might truly belong, unlike the daily life she occupies. But there’s no clear path between the stories and the business of waking and eating breakfast and working at the law firm; Lancaster; the women she actually knows. The only person she has whisked anywhere is Celia (away from a bank, yes, but only from the front entrance and a man Celia followed). And the only girl bandit she’s met is a client of Moshe Schumacher’s, a sniveling upper-crust girl who shoplifted a party dress. Jo’s life is small, she knows this, but can’t small things change? She’s secretly saving for her own apartment: she doesn’t run the house, she won’t inherit the store—she’s a spare daughter. Why shouldn’t she go? Her father will object, of course. Marriage, he’ll tell her, she must wait until marriage. Which Sadie can apparently stomach—life with a Bill, who pulls teeth for a living—but Jo can’t fathom it, and she’s already twenty-six. So her savings slowly accumulate. Her plan is to stay mum until she has enough money and a good lead on an apartment. When her father objects, she will throw a fit. If necessary, she will include in her fit the fact that Lillian Schumacher, his tartish girlfriend, lives alone.

  But Goldie is gone, and this Jo did not foresee; she wouldn’t have predicted such a thing or the resulting cold fear. Though Jo had seen changes; shouldn’t she have been prepared? Last winter, wandering seized Goldie, a wandering not unlike Celia’s: distraction, day-long absences, returns with freezing hands and muddy shoes and raw sorrow in her face. There had been wandering and sorrow woven into Celia from childhood, but never Goldie, the oldest, the reliable one. In January, Jo had noticed Goldie disappearing on Sundays, and then found evidence of weekday absences—dishes unwashed, groceries sparse, a glimpse of Goldie downtown boarding an unfamiliar streetcar. Separately Goldie and Celia left the house and separately they returned, both windblown, red-cheeked, their attentions fixed on invisible remote points. Often they seemed peaceful but agitated easily, as if sheltered by a kind of dream bubble; if you placed an index finger lightly on the surface, it would burst and they would give you scathing looks. If they came home distraught, you did not know why and might never learn. Later, if you talked to Goldie, she seemed calm and reasonable. Purposeful on workdays, dressed for the library in pressed skirts and blouses, neatly pinning her hair, never missing her streetcar. Only after work did the day loosen. Goldie remained capable: she laundered clothes, marketed, fed the cat and rescued it from trees. She cooked the family meals, but no longer rushed to ensure supper was ready by the time their father returned home. And their father waited, saying nothing, busying himself with his papers and clearing his throat.

  A few times Jo followed Goldie, only to find her strolling quietly along the river or the harbor, despite the ice and grit of the waterfront, the rough winds off the lake. In early spring, Goldie chose the mud browns and old snow of Delaware Park, sat on benches with books. It was that mundane, and perhaps that easily understood—a half-deserted park, a certain aloneness—but here too the air was damp and chilly, and Goldie seemed impervious.

  You couldn’t exactly say Goldie was going off. Instead she seemed relentlessly herself: more bookish, more sealed in her opinions, more lost in her music. She took to playing the piano daily, with an intense and dreamy concentration, breaking a silence that had descended after their mother’s death. Playing Mozart instead of tending to the housecleaning or to their father’s tea (which Jo— and, in truth, their father—could brew perfectly well but generally refused to). Celia lay on the sofa, listening. And sometimes Jo too would watch Goldie play, Goldie’s chapped hands oddly beautiful, and Goldie seemed entirely elsewhere, ignoring all of them.

  THERE WAS a man,
there had to be, probably the piano teacher. Jo had seen them together once, at the Regent Theatre, where he played. He and Goldie had merely exchanged hellos, but hellos that held no room for anyone else but the two of them, hellos that left Jo and Celia behind in the theater aisle. So maybe Goldie has gone to him, maybe it’s that simple (if stupid). Maybe Jo should have told Sadie. Or not. Even this morning, Celia insisted Goldie was fine, and Celia—at least an unmuddled Celia—might really know. But Celia’s been upset, and upset confuses her thinking: you have to catch her in a moment of clarity, before the facts mire and disintegrate. You have to catch her when she doesn’t need rescue.

  If Goldie is dead it was not a simple death. She isn’t the weepy, frail sort, or the brazen, gun-blazing sort. She wouldn’t take her own life, not Goldie—she’s too practical for that, too canny. But something might have happened. This is what frightens Jo most: there are always violent strangers.