The First Desire

by Nancy Reisman

  Her mother would have known in a minute whether to be frightened or not; would have wiped her hands on her apron and walked to the front door and gazed out, listening—to the trees, or to Goldie herself, somewhere in the distance (they always seemed of one mind)—then either nodded and returned to her tasks or tossed down the apron and hurried off, leaving Jo to keep an eye on Celia. In that doorway, Jo listens and waits, but the leaves sound like small waves and carry no other meaning.

  THE LAWYERS’OFFICE can be deadening, but this week it seems better than the house, where her jitteriness expands to fill each room and interrupts even the stories she tells herself. At the office, typing and filing anesthetize her, and while she cannot dream up girl bandit rescues, she can conjure the interiors of different theaters—the Regent, the Great Lakes, the Hippodrome—the plush seats and unspooling movie light, the thick peripheral dark, piano music rising. In the months after their mother died, she and Celia and Goldie—sometimes even Sadie—spent free afternoons together at the pictures, and it was easy for them together: sitting with her sisters in the theater Jo felt less lonely, and less in need of being alone. Those days had the quality of shared sleep. And if, at her desk, she keeps her mind fixed on those matinees, she will make it through her morning, her afternoon, her typing and filing and dictation from Attorney Schumacher.

  Still, her lunch break comes as a shock. When she stops typing, she finds herself blinking at the stark light of Goldie’s absence, and her hands are trembling again. What caused the wandering? It appeared as winter stars appear, suddenly visible, and then began to take the place of Goldie herself, until only odd bits of Goldie remained in the house on Lancaster. Not unlike her mother, who seems now to reside only in the wallpaper and the samovar and lace tablecloths. At the office, the air is heavy and unmoving, too hot, and for a moment the relationships of floor to desk, desk to chair, wall to window seem jumbled. What presses in on her is at once heavy and perilously empty, and nameless: she feels it as a near cracking of her ribs and a hard suck of air, imagines tumbling down the basement stairs at Lancaster. Where she will be stranded if Goldie doesn’t return.

  What about last Wednesday? Yesterday, when Sadie asked, Jo couldn’t say, except that on Wednesdays Goldie seemed especially distant. What detail of last Wednesday had she missed? It was an ordinary day. A nothing day. Last week a nothing week. Yet if someone other than Sadie asked, if Vera La Mont were to ask, Jo would say something had changed. If her own mother asked, she’d say here are the pieces: distraction, wandering, piano, argument. But if her mother could ask, there would be no change. Goldie would be her same irritating self.

  Jo leaves the office for a bench on the square, her lunch in a paper sack, but she does not want lunch. There’s a patch of green lawn and the shade of an oak into which, on a simpler day, one might disappear.

  MOST PEOPLE, Jo suspects, are untrustworthy, and she prefers them silent, prefers silence to speech, but often her own words emerge snappishly—or, when she is upset, strangled—with a sharpness and pitch she regrets. After lunch, after Moshe Schumacher has spoken to the precinct lieutenant about Goldie and called his streetwise clients, Jo’s thank-you is a small pinched burp. She gazes at his oversized suit, notes a tea stain on his necktie in the shape of a bug. The stain begins to blur: she is staring, her eyes seem filmy and strange, and he waits for her to say more. He stubs out his cigar, asks her if she’d like to sit down.

  “She’s not dead,” Jo says.

  “No,” Moshe Schumacher says. “This would be a hasty conclusion.”

  “She’s too stubborn to be dead.”

  “I see.”

  The plush chairs in his office seem out of a hotel lobby, and not of this place, not at all of this life, the overstuffed room itself momentarily strange to her. In her hands there is a small tremor, but her hands seem separate from her arms and certainly from her voice. She knots her fingers behind her back, tries to still them, and her fingers flutter, tap her knuckles. In her mind she hears the tapping as a marching band’s tinny drumroll. Fourth of July, the sky overcast, a city parade—what is the point of parades?—and Goldie on the front porch reading another fat book by a Russian.

  “Do you want to go home?” Moshe Schumacher says. The words come to her but the breeze through the back windows is lifting the drapes, making pattering sounds like slow flapping wings over the drumroll. Jo shakes her head and burps out another “thank you” and returns to the plain front office and her typing desk, where her hands will occasionally cooperate.

  At the end of the day, she does not go directly home, but instead to a sweetshop three blocks from the office, and buys a small bag of chocolates. There is in the first taste, finally, an easing of fear: the dense, melting sweetness a kind of knowledge, a fat drop of her secret life.

  SHE KNOWS exactly where the piano teacher lives and she ought to go there immediately, but it’s as if she is underwater, and the small blue house the pianist shares with his father hovers far above the surface, untouchable. Even telephoning seems impossible, though what if Goldie is there? In love and probably moronic but there nonetheless, a streetcar away. She must be told to come home, where she belongs and Jo does not. But if Goldie is not there, where would she be? Nowhere Jo can imagine, nowhere, and now the trembling starts again, and she calms herself with the thought of Goldie in the blue house. Like a lucky stone you carry in your pocket and occasionally touch: for this moment, hoping is better than knowing.

  Jo waits until Saturday evening and finds the piano teacher at the Regent Theatre, where he still plays in the evenings. When he’s finished for the night, he collects his music and closes the piano, and she follows him into the red-carpeted lobby. Dark-haired, thirty maybe, his face sculpted enough for the pictures— though altogether too melancholy.

  “Goldie’s my sister,” she tells him, though this isn’t the first time they’ve met.

  He nods, lowers his eyes. “How is Goldie?”

  “You tell me,” Jo says. She doesn’t mean to be sharp, but there it is, the edgy, threatening undertone.

  “Tell you? Tell you what?” Furrowed brows, a slight catching of his breath, nothing false in his puzzlement. At the end of the lobby a clerk wipes down the concession stand, while the last of the audience leaks into the street.

  “What happened?” she says.

  “She missed her piano lesson. I don’t know why.”

  From her pocketbook Jo pulls a sheet of newspaper with Sadie’s classified ad. “We haven’t seen her since last weekend.” He covers his mouth with his hand and then his eyes fill. She can’t look at him; really, he ought to be more poised. He’s bewildered, and she does not want bewilderment: it makes her brutish. She would like to kick him.

  “Doesn’t your father like her?” Jo says.

  He looks at her curiously, those big eyes staring. “You’re not much like your sister, are you?”

  Her fingers begin to flutter. “Lookit,” she says. “I didn’t say anything to my father. About you. My sister Celia didn’t either.”

  But there’s no change in his expression, he’s pale and shocked looking and she feels like she’s swallowed bad milk. His shoes are scuffed brown leather, ordinary and strangely sad.

  “She was wandering around town more, you know? More than usual. Near the water.”

  He shakes his head. “I haven’t heard from her.”

  “No quarrel?”

  “No.”

  When she steps onto the damp street, Jo’s throat closes.

  SHE HAS NEVER actually touched a gun: she doesn’t know anything about relative weights and calibers, about bullets or the steadiness and strength required to pull a trigger. The guns she imagines have the heft of a bread knife, slim and light and easy to wield. That’s not the part of the fantasy she cares about anyway: usually, the gun she imagines carrying is more like a pearl-handled wand. At times she’s imagined the lobby of Buffalo Savings Bank, herself disguised with a mask and a man’s suit, holding out her bre
ad knife–gun; imagined the moment when the customers and tellers freeze and beg for mercy and hand over precious things, the moment when she dashes out to the waiting DeSoto and disappears into another city, a flurry of lights, a restaurant with a private table. The mask melts away. There is the question of what to order. Roast duck. Roast lamb. Baked salmon. What sort of breads the waiters should bring, what sorts of desserts. And for a companion a loyal brown-eyed girl appears, a girl strikingly like the ticket vendor at the Hippodrome. She offers Jo a rose, the kind the Bobbed Bandit wove into her hat.

  Only on the days when the next-door neighbor’s dog falls into spasms of barking does Jo imagine herself pulling a trigger, as a sharpshooter taking aim from an attic window with an Annie Oakley rifle. She would catch the dog on the first shot, silencing him. His bark is harsh, piercing, and though his owners know better, he still gets loose, still torments Celia’s cat. How many times has he chased the cat up a tree? Four? Five? And each time Goldie’s negotiated with Ruby Berman to tie up the dog, then pulled the heavy ladder to the maple or the elm and climbed. Using bits of fish, she’s coaxed the cat down to a reachable branch. All the while Celia’s paced the yard and glared at the Bermans’ house, calling in a squeaky voice Kitty kitty kitty and smoking Jo’s cigarettes. Eventually Goldie would lift the distraught cat down from the tree, the fat orange thing racing into the house and hiding. In the upstairs hall, Celia’s Kitty kitty kitty became a halting lullaby.

  But now Goldie is gone, it’s Sunday and the cat’s in the maple again, the dog scrabbling at the trunk and Celia yelling to no avail. Jo shouts and throws stones at his feet until he backs away. She leaves Celia with a handful of stones to throw and raps on the Bermans’ door.

  Ruby Berman emerges, a round woman in her thirties with a mop of walnut hair and an always-red face, and today a stained cooking apron.

  “Your dog got loose again,” Jo says.

  “Baby!” Ruby yells, and the dog barks from the edge of the lawn. “The boys must have let him out. They forget.”

  “Cat’s in the tree again.”

  “Baby! Jo, I’m sorry.”

  “I’m not like Goldie,” Jo says. “I’ll call the pound.”

  Ruby smoothes her hair, gazes past Jo toward the beige pavement and the arching elms. “Sadie came by. Talked to me about Goldie.”

  “Did she?”

  “I hope Goldie’s all right,” Ruby says.

  “Kitty kitty kitty,” Celia calls.

  Jo knots her fingers together. “You going to tie up your dog?”

  “Kitty kitty kitty. Jo?”

  Ruby sighs, wipes her hands on her apron, and starts after the dog, who dashes away behind the shrubs. From the toolshed, Jo drags out the heavy ladder.

  VERA LA MONT was born Estelle Mackosky. She was young, and perhaps stupid—or perhaps in love with a stupid man—holding up Hoyler’s Jewelers and remaining in Buffalo. She should have fled. Chicago, or Philadelphia, or Miami. Still, there must have been more to her, to use a stage name in her hometown. It’s been years now since Vera’s arrest and trial. Years since the papers reported anything about her.

  CHAPTER 3

  Irving

  JULY 1929

  Two pairs will not beat a full house, but the hand seems good enough to bet on, to meet Leo’s three raises. Irving knows that unless he’s sure, Leo doesn’t raise more than twice, but the pair of sevens, the pair of tens fan out as shining promises. And it’s Irving’s turn for promises realized, for more than distraction and Artie Mankowitz’s bootleg gin. He’s betting petty cash, five dollars from his father’s store, five dollars he’ll replace in the morning, before his father makes the daily count. The cards feel slick in his hand, beautiful. The other players—Marty and Lenny and Eli—have the flat bored look of men waiting to pay rent, having all dropped their bluffs. Leo you cannot read, and he could reverse himself, defy his own habits. Once in the game Leo plays without pity, which is why before dealing he offered to lower the stakes for the night, why on the sideboard he set out lemonade as well as gin, why he directly told Irving to sit out any hand he wanted. This is Leo’s nod to Goldie’s disappearance. He is, after all, Irving’s best friend. But Irving wants a night without her absence pressing in, it’s his turn; he’s mixed his lemonade with gin and played house stakes for every hand. He is trying to listen to the cards, as Leo says, though mostly he studies the precise patterning on the tens, the vertical rows of diamonds and clubs, the two-figure inset, rubs their glossy backs, and finds all signs inscrutable. Two solid pairs. He bets and loses the rest of the cash. “Good pairs—breaks your heart,” Eli says, and Leo pours more gin and lemonade. “Just watch out next week,” Irving says, and Leo says, “I will.”

  If Irving’s father paid him well enough, he wouldn’t dip into petty cash. If his father paid him well enough, all sorts of problems would vanish: the salary is just enough to keep him in good shoes, not enough for his own flat, or for a real city life. But his father is waiting for something more, for proof of Irving’s worthiness, probably in the form of marriage. “You like that Rachel Brownstein?” his father says, and in fact Irving does, she’s brown-eyed and sweet-faced and curvy, but you know at a glance she’s too good for nightclubs, too earnest in her prayers. She’s the kind who swoons over babies and goes to temple by choice. True, Rachel has his mother’s quiet steadiness, but his mother’s dead: now even his father seems to want a good time (why else would he take up with Lillian Schumacher?).

  “Rachel’s a nice girl,” Irving says.

  “Good. You should take her out.”

  Only if it comes to that. He’s worked four years in the store and will someday inherit it, but someday is unimaginable. And if he dates Rachel Brownstein, how much of a raise can he expect? His father will still treat him as a boy. No, he deserves the petty cash.

  Beyond Leo’s flat the night stretches, a wide swath of dark broken by yellow dots and squares, and empty of money. Irving finishes his lemonade and collects his jacket, but in Leo’s tiny foyer he hesitates, considers asking Leo for a loan, that five dollars just for a few days. Yet if he borrows, Leo won’t let him play again, not until he’s paid it back and then some. Marty and Eli and Lenny are broke, and anyway would call him a mooch, the excuse of Goldie notwithstanding.

  “Next week,” he tells Leo, accepts the pat on the back and Leo’s “See you at Minnie’s?”—the speakeasy where Leo always pays.

  Irving takes a streetcar down Elmwood to Lancaster, the night air mild, lake water and grass mixed with trash and motor oil, passing whiffs of stale coffee. It’s two a.m. and the gin is curdling into a nasty headache, and if he does not clean the store at seven his father will ask why. What makes his father think he belongs there anyway? True, Irving likes persuading customers to buy, he’s got a way with the women, he’s inherited his father’s good looks; true, he loves the opals, the sapphires, the gold cuff links; but most of the time the store bores him. Mundane cleaning and paperwork, mail to be sorted, bank deposits readied, the slips dutifully returned to his father. The long wait for customers. The simplest work at the bench makes him impatient, all those tedious fine movements while you hold the rest of your body still. As if you are half-dead. He would rather own a nightclub: that would be something.

  In the dark house, he checks the extra tea tin for grocery change (fifteen cents), the table and chairs for his sisters’ pocketbooks, then the dining room, the parlor, the coatrack. Tiptoes into Goldie’s deserted room and tries the top dresser drawer, her closet: in a skirt pocket he finds a quarter. Jo and Celia are light sleepers, their rooms impossible, which is too bad. Once in his own bedroom he checks his suit jackets and trousers, tries former hiding places for cash—the night-table drawer, the small bookshelf, the bowl of marbles—all of which he’s scoured before. At the bottom of the marble bowl he finds another dime, though this requires emptying the bowl, sprawling on the carpet, and grabbing at runaway marbles to keep them from rolling onto the wood floor. They shoot off in
opposite directions, as if conspiring. He is twenty years old. His hands are damp, the marbles slippery.

  He undresses and lies in bed near the open window, not sleeping, watching the silhouettes of leaves and the occasional flicker of streetlamps. He does not feel like Irving: the name seems to loosen from his body in the dark. Torso, face, legs, arms, his skin sensitive to the warm air, his muscles tense; and the plain bed, which could be in any room on any summer night, his body any man’s. Why then this particular house, this particular Irving life? Why not be called Leo, or anything else. Irving is simply a cloak to wear in the world of his father, though the name is less alien when Sadie says it, or, before, his mother, or at times Goldie, the ones with a soft spot for him, who might give him things on the sly. Even then he is part Irving, part opaque unknowing.

  Sadie will have five dollars but whether she’ll help him is uncertain: she is still in a state. They’ve all been in a state about Goldie—Irving himself is clumsier, more easily spooked—and it has become tiresome. This week, Sadie’s more tightly wound—a pogo stick mood—which will make her either generous or deaf to him. It is not a good time to ask, but asking is the least desperate choice.

  For a few hours he skates at the edge of sleep, close enough to feel the pieces of his life begin to move and recombine—marbles rolling toward Goldie, toward Leo, Lillian Schumacher’s red mouth, the watchful faces of kings—but then he veers back into wakefulness. At five-thirty he shaves and bathes, dresses and descends to the kitchen, where Jo is eating toast and poring over a Sears catalogue. She studies him warily, eases back in her chair and closes the catalogue without marking her place. “You’re early,” she says.

  “Cleaning this morning,” he says.

  “You might try the house.” She’s reverted to her natural rudeness, a perversely reassuring state. This cheers him. She bites into her toast and ignores him, idly flipping through the catalogue again. Irving packs bread and cheese, stops to pet the cat, and leaves through the kitchen door, feeling oddly hopeful.