“What about this autumn?” he said.
Her breathing took a fast plunge. “Where would we live?”
“Here.” He kissed her, stroked her face. “There’s plenty of room.”
With his father, a sweet man, a widower who had raised him alone. Daniel would never leave his father’s town, she knew this. Just as she would not have left her mother.
It was almost spring, a month before her mother’s unveiling.
“Not just yet,” she told him. “Soon.”
CHAPTER 6
Sadie
SEPTEMBER 1929
Pearl Kaminsky buzzes around the dress rack where Sadie is idly sifting through the better pieces. A hot September Thursday, a day on which Sadie needs to move slowly, and Pearl—a saleswoman more often discreet than not—has apparently had too much coffee. Thin and nervous, her eyes overbright, eyelids stuck open, she circles Sadie, flashing handbags and accessories. The oblong clutch perfect for swatting.
“No thank you, Pearl.”
“Is there something else I can help you with? How about hats, Sadie? Do you need a new hat?”
“Not just yet.” Sadie flashes her keep away look, the closest to rude she’s been to Pearl, who God knows has her own burdens— tubercular husband, reprobate son—and could be snapping beneath the weight of them. Who would have predicted these turns in Pearl’s life, or the way they’ve dimmed her early glamour? Today, Pearl has held back for some time: Sadie’s been floating through the store for a half-hour, trying to stave off a growing preoccupation with undergarments. She ought to buy a dress and sweater for Celia, whose clothes are an amalgam of hand-me-downs and bright ill-fitting dresses from sale racks. Yet she returns to the display discreetly tucked into the store’s back corner, pulled by the absurd desire to replace the ragged underclothes in Goldie’s bureau—as if knickers could bring Goldie back. And here Sadie is, considering white cotton. With a bit of lace? Lace can’t hurt, really it’s lovely, the pattern of flowering vines along the leg and waist bands. You can’t help but admire the handiwork.
She’s dodged Pearl’s questions and wonders if Pearl guesses the direction of her thinking. Goldie’s disappearance makes people nervous. Even Sadie’s friends, who’ve stopped inquiring, have taken to a forced cheeriness, and this makes Goldie—or Goldie’s imprint—all the more present, a kind of pet ghost trailing Sadie through the city, hovering invisibly in shops and weakening the floorboards. Which might explain beyond coffee and commissions Pearl’s own obsession with handbags and evening gloves.
But the floorboards are solid. Maybe Sadie needs some lace-trimmed underwear of her own. Pearl tends to her other customers, and Sadie tries to distract herself with sweater sets, which are soft and finely made but too warm to contemplate in this weather. A dizziness passes through her, what might be the beginnings of a migraine; for an instant Sadie could crumple like a two-year-old. This Pearl Kaminsky does not seem to notice: she’s advising a matronly woman who loves yellow and pink. Neither color suits the woman, and Pearl holds up a blue-gray linen suit. The woman gazes longingly at a pale rose debutante’s gown on sale. Everyone is unhappy. “Pearl,” Sadie says. “Could you help me find some things for Celia?” And the moment passes.
IT’S, BEEN two months and Sadie feels herself becoming strange: the impulse to buy underclothes and lipsticks (they are everywhere, her lipsticks); smoking in public; absentmindedness (where are her keys? Her hat? Her umbrella?). Ordinary life seems to occur in islands of time divided by maverick currents. Jo is as moody and difficult as ever, though more pensive; Irving’s hands won’t stop moving—he’s smoking, or habitually smoothing his hair, or rubbing a rabbit’s foot on a metal clip (and must regularly be asked to put that thing away). Celia’s sadness seems more intractable: she’s taken to wearing Goldie’s skirts and beads, as well as Sadie’s lipstick—must she wear the same shade?—and spends long hours in Goldie’s room. Bill’s more hardheaded, and he seems increasingly in league with her father, who himself is unbearable, sterner, more strident than usual. He won’t refer to Goldie by name and he regularly shouts at Celia, who he knows cannot bear shouting. He refuses to hire a housekeeper, despite Jo’s avoidance of housework and Celia’s spotty competence and Irving’s refusal to wash anything other than himself. He persists in his affair with Lillian Schumacher, and all this Sadie has tolerated, making only the mildest of suggestions about the house. Instead, she concentrates on her own domestic routine, trying to extend the ordinary islands of time, though Goldie’s absence keeps eroding them. Diligently, Sadie keeps the Sabbath, which seems a claim on permanence. And it’s a relief when her father agrees to come to Shabbos dinner: maybe for an evening they can find normalcy.
His arrival at first seems indistinguishable from last year’s Sabbath visits, when he was somber but self-possessed, and later wistful, more relaxed. This evening is quiet, Bill is deferential and kind, and though Sadie does not feel at ease, exactly, there’s a formal calm, the sort she wishes would mark a permanent change. She serves a light meal and good wine, and her father speaks about his plans for the store, his buying trips to New York, the new bridge to Canada. Tonight his voice is smooth and low, the one she likes— no sign of disturbance or shouting—and it comforts her simply to hear him talk, even about construction. Throughout dinner she finds herself contemplating his elegance, a handsomeness enunciated by his beautiful suit. No doubt the suits also caught Lillian Schumacher’s attention, and she wishes he would choose a more dignified woman, though it is, of course, not her place to say: he will not abide mention of other available women. She clears the dinner plates, and before she has brought the dessert he fills his pipe at the table and lights it, as if he’s forgotten the order of things, or her general insistence on eating and smoking in separate rooms. She brews and pours tea, and Bill smokes too now, a cigar: plumes of smoke fan out along the ceiling.
“Your sister, she’s gone,” her father says. “We should sit.”
She freezes. “What?” She’s been lulled, despite his recent behavior, she’s been lulled—and by talk of steel beams—into forgetting the shouting, the unkindness. When did he last speak Goldie’s name? But this, to sit shivah, consigning Goldie to the dead? “What do you mean?”
“The calendar is where?”
And Bill’s watching her now, concern in his face, but no surprise or distress: this is, she thinks, the face he uses with his patients before pulling their teeth. And her own face feels hot, her throat constricting and her whole body tensing, a momentary absence of breath. “You can’t,” she says. The dining room table seems wholly combustible. Shameful, she thinks, and the word slips out sotto voce, a hiss.
Bill, apparently unashamed, shakes his head slightly and coughs.
Her father’s voice rises in the old pinching way. “This is how you speak to your father?”
“You don’t know if Goldie’s dead,” Sadie says.
“To me, she is dead.” Or has shamed the family and ought to be considered so. Her father, stone-faced behind his cloud of smoke, acknowledges no hypocrisy.
And Sadie can only think of her own limbs then, the pulling currents in her arms and legs, and she rises, a drumming in her head, the air in the room turning to a bilious warm fog, which finally clears when she reaches the kitchen porch door and opens it to a rush of cold. From here she can see past the dark fence line to the lights of other houses, starred patches of sky between clouds, oak leaves rustling on heavy branches and along the damp ground. Sadie’s mother would not have chosen this way, her father has to know that, but he knows many things he ignores. He’s never spoken of Russia, as if in not speaking he could cast off those years. Perhaps he’s wanted a casting off of children as well; if so, starting with Goldie makes little sense. Cruel thoughts, but ones Sadie lets herself hold in her mind while she listens for the cats that prowl through her yard and the night birds cawing somewhere beyond the fence. She keeps the back door open and at the kitchen sink fills the pans to soak and soaps t
he china, while pipe smoke seeps into the kitchen. She will not bring out the dessert, and her father will not follow her here: unless they speak on his terms they will not speak. He’ll smoke and finish his tea and explain his plans to Bill. This is his way. The continuing pipe smoke says enough. It trails Bill into the kitchen, and he takes the calendar from the wall and Sadie feigns absorption in the silver.
Once Bill retreats, she waits several minutes, closes the back door, and forces herself out to the dining room. Her father and Bill sit beside each other now, talking in low tones, teacups pushed aside for the calendar, her father sipping a new glass of sweet wine. Sadie leans through the doorway and fixes her gaze on the crown of her father’s head. “Good Shabbos,” she says, then hurries across the living room and up the stairs to the second floor, where she picks up a novel and locks herself in the guest room.
Here too she can breathe. There are only murmurs from the dining room, the rush of night air through the window screen. The novel is set in New York, a romance. Margaret loved the bustle of the city, Chapter 3 begins, but that one clear sentence seems to devolve into a pattern of ink she traces for pages without comprehending. Eventually she hears footsteps downstairs, the front door opening and closing, her father’s Ford coughing on the street.
Bill’s footsteps travel to the stairs, turn to a knock on the door. “Darling?” he says. His coaxing tone. “Sadie, it’s your father’s decision.”
New York. A city that seems, like many places, lovely and unkind. Before her mother’s later illness, before Bill, before she’d even finished high school, she’d wanted New York—the New York of theater and symphony and style. College at Barnard. Her father permitted only the University of Buffalo. And now that time was done, the desire to unravel it mediated by this: she’d had years with her mother. She’d met Bill. She’d moved to this house, away from Lancaster, and she planned for children. But what if she’d settled in New York? If Goldie had?
“Sadie?”
“I’m busy just now.” She returns to Margaret loved the bustle of the city and begins the chapter again.
YOU CAN’T erase a person, though her father in his rage will try. But Goldie keeps becoming clearer to Sadie. Saturday afternoon the light is pale saffron, sometimes chalky, muted by low clouds, and through the shifting brightness, Goldie’s body emerges in sharp detail. The body that is or is not: the narrow ankles, delicate feet, easily bruised—hence the solid shoes. Plump elbows, full breasts not unlike Sadie’s, her whole body not unlike Sadie’s, but for slight variations, and poor taste in clothes. A few more scars. Is Goldie less careful? Or was she? And there’s the confusion again: which tense do you use, even in thought? Can you say she was more scarred without asserting her death? When last seen, Goldie had limber hands, a once-injured hip. In cold weather, there was the faint stiffness to her walk, and when she was surprised, a slight stutter peppered her speech. Of course the small details surface: Sadie has memorized Goldie, memorized all of them and now they are imprinted. And it’s absurd of her father to believe otherwise.
This Sadie concedes: if Goldie is unharmed she’s got herself into something her father would condemn. Which would mean what? A romance with a Catholic? Pregnancy? Not what you’d expect from Goldie but you wouldn’t expect dead either. And if Goldie is dead? Which she is not. But if? Only if, Papa has a point: seal away the body, seal away uncertainty, end false hope. If not— and how can you believe her dead—what then?
The Sunday after her father’s visit, Sadie’s in bed, the thickness of sleep still on her and at its perimeter a sensation of dirt falling over her. In the half-dream her eyes are open. Paralysis has climbed from her legs to her torso and arms, and then she reminds herself to breathe. The bedroom comes into focus, and her perfectly movable limbs, and Bill beside her sleeping.
Forget dreams: edge the thought out a doorway, lock the door. Her panic abates, and she wraps her arms around Bill and pulls tight, as if he is the missing body. For two days they have been speaking in empty pleasantries, and she has not wanted him to touch her, the loneliness worsening. Awake, he will not budge from his support of her father, and she is appalled. Asleep, he is better company, comforting to touch—the husband she wants him to be.
FOR A WEEK her days seem slippery and uncertain: she tries to remedy this by cleaning. Her own housekeeping takes on a frenzied, hysterical quality—her manner not unlike Pearl Kaminsky’s— though at Lancaster she is focused and methodical. If there is a clue she missed in Goldie’s room—in the closet dust, on the rain-streaked windows—she will find it. She sweeps and scrubs the floor, bleaches the sheets, polishes the bureau, the rocking chair, washes the windows, the oval mirror. It isn’t as much satisfying as trancelike. Sadie doesn’t bother with the rest of the house, though it’s in shambles: for a moment the flaw in her logic gapes at her, then she continues with the woodwork.
In mid-September, before the shivah starts, Sadie visits the Falls alone. Swarms of tourists gawk at the torrents, the mist. They mill in predictable patterns: the Falls is turning them all into sheep, stupid with the pleasures of the autumn, sun, mist, picnic lunch, the giant curtains of water. It’s as if no one ever drowned here. There’s pleasure in that forgetting, and the illusion that scanning the crowd will evoke Goldie herself. As if all this time she’s been a tourist with a bag of peanuts, walking the paths of Goat Island, watching couples kiss near the Horseshoe Falls. Or maybe kissing someone herself? What could be so wrong with kissing? And why not imagine Goldie, here or elsewhere, with or without someone to kiss, with or without the bag of peanuts? Why shouldn’t she see chunks of rainbow where the sun hits the mist? Far better than dead: why not pretend this? Which Sadie will do.
SO SADIE’S FATHER will mourn, and she will quietly disavow the shivah. This she cannot tell Bill. Craziness, he’d say. Wouldn’t he tell her she was sick with loss—all the more reason to sit shivah? He might blame Goldie, and even if he doesn’t, he’s so much more pleasant when he’s not enforcing a point. No, she won’t tell Bill. She’ll think of the Falls.
Still, Sadie is unprepared for the scene at Lancaster on the first day of mourning: the house in fact now clean but underlit, mirrors covered with sheets, a flat silence, her father in the parlor, sitting stiffly on a wooden chair, summoning all his stoniness. It’s a mourning unlike any she’s seen: no weeping, just a vast chill. Lillian Schumacher sits beside him, hair swept up, queenly in a soft black dress and blue silk scarf, and quietly coos. He does not seem to mind Lillian’s pigeon sounds, though they interrupt his silence and rage. What is it you say to her?
“Hello, Lillian. Thank you for your kindness,” Sadie manages.
Lillian nods and seems to contemplate the eternal via the floral wallpaper.
Irving is glassy-eyed, clearly drunk, propped up in a hard-backed chair. Today he seems to be palming a marble. Celia’s in a dark blue dress—one of Goldie’s—and she fumes from the window seat, apparently hoping to stare Lillian down, but Lillian holds to her affected piety and strokes Papa’s hand.
All morning he rages silently and accepts condolences from reluctant visitors, neighbors who move slowly into the house, hover for a few minutes, leave food in the kitchen, and quickly depart. A handful stay longer: a few cousins and Moshe Schumacher, the lawyer; his dazed wife, Bertha; and Lillian, his regrettable sister. Nothing like the shivah for Sadie’s mother, that week of bittersweet collapse and near-constant company.
Even in his wooden chair, her father seems massive, royal, though a royalty she does not understand. She cannot summon her love for him. And sitting in the parlor will not help her understand, will not remind her of love. You sit and time crawls. You sit and eventually your mind empties, doesn’t it? And fills with the knowledge of absence? Of God? But what she hears is Lillian’s cooing, which seems more and more like bedroom obscenity. By late morning, Celia is perfectly still, a furious stillness no one would mistake for peace.
Just before noon, Irving begins to snore, and it’s Lilli
an who goes to him, nudges him awake. “You must be exhausted.” She smiles at him and widens her eyes, as if in private understanding.
“I suppose we all are,” Sadie says.
Lillian returns to their father, resumes stroking his hand. “Of course,” she says. “And I’m so sorry.”
At this Celia snorts, and then their father stamps his foot, and Lillian turns her face back to the wallpaper—as if they have synchronized their movements, which in some peculiar way they have. But the quiet can’t last much longer, the room’s too stifling: Celia’s bound to do something more provocative than snorting, and if she doesn’t maybe Sadie herself should.
“Excuse us,” Sadie tells Lillian. She turns to Celia. “Help me for a moment, would you?” and they leave the parlor for the kitchen. Out the kitchen window, a thin stream of smoke rises from the back porch. Jo, in her usual spot.
“It’s Lillian’s fault,” Celia says. “Big Tit Lillian. She’s a menace.”
“I don’t know what you mean,” Sadie says.
“Yes you do.”
“And I wish you wouldn’t talk like that.”
“I know,” Celia says, pity in her voice.
Then Jo’s in the doorway, cigarette in hand. Slim, wearily elegant. Behind her, jays disappear into the orange and red of a maple.
“Nice job on Goldie’s room,” Jo says. Of course she’d have recognized Sadie’s work, but her tone is unreadable. You never know what Jo might say next, how deep it will cut.
“Jo, please. Let’s not.”
But Jo simply offers Sadie a cigarette. None of them return to the parlor.
WHEN THE SHIVAH is finished and the sheets come off the mirrors, Abe’s anger persists, now more tempered but more inclusive: his daughters have not respected his wishes. Sadie quietly continues the out-of-town Missing Persons ads, checks in on the house, occasionally brings her father and Irving lunch at the store. It’s a matter of time before her father starts in again. He waits until October, just before the High Holidays. He’s at the jeweler’s bench, sorting a group of tiny sapphires, blue dots on a black tray.
The First Desire Page 6