The First Desire

by Nancy Reisman

  “Your sister’s things, it’s time to pack,” he says. “Give them to a church,” he says. Meaning not to Jews.

  “Why?” Sadie says. “We keep Mama’s things.”

  “Catholic or Protestant,” he says. “I don’t care.” He pushes gems back and forth between small blue hills.

  “I’m sorry I don’t have time to help,” Sadie says. “I’ve left sandwiches and apples.”

  Her father does not raise the subject with Sadie again. According to Irving and Jo, he wants that bedroom cleared and painted. He intends to buy a new bed. He will hire outside the family to do it, if he has to.

  Jo capitulates, or so it seems. She’s demure with him, and it’s a strange thing to witness, all her “Yes, Papa”s, “Of course, Papa”s, and then her lonely smoking out in the yard. She packs for donation to St. Vincent de Paul and hires the painter; she prices beds. And when the painter’s done, she has him paint Celia’s bedroom and her own. Goldie’s bed is hauled away, a new mattress delivered. After she’s finished with the house and the visit to St. Vincent de Paul, she leads Sadie to the upstairs storage closet. Two new boxes are wedged into the back. “He doesn’t know the difference, you know,” Jo says. “My clothes from Celia’s from Goldie’s. Doesn’t know Mama’s.”

  IT’S A COLD rainy Thursday when Sadie enters the house to silence and Celia napping on the new bed, wearing Goldie’s dun skirt and white blouse though they’re too thin for autumn. Cream-white arms covered by goosebumps, no garish makeup today, Celia’s prettiness surfacing in sleep. Sadie tucks a wool blanket around her and descends to the kitchen to start tea. After a time, Celia appears, the pale green sweater Sadie bought her covering the blouse.

  “I suppose Goldie’s in New York,” Celia says. “Don’t you think?”

  New York. Margaret loved the bustle of the city. “You sure about that, Celia?”

  “No. It could be somewhere else. Miami.”

  “You talk to Jo about this?”

  Celia shakes her head. “Jo’s in a mood.”

  “Why don’t you sit down?” Sadie says. “You want a bite to eat?”

  Celia complies. The orange cat saunters by and leaps into her lap, and she scratches its head and strokes the thick fur of its back, the purring radiating through the room, over the low rush of wind against the house, the round clock’s ponderous ticks.

  Sadie slices bread and cheese and apples, holds an apple slice on her tongue and lets the sugar melt. Did her father foresee this, Celia’s devoted, embroidered waiting? Because what, short of formal mourning, would it take to end Celia’s pining? Which will now continue nonetheless.

  It’s November. Through the city there’s the shock and chaos of the crash, the markets dissolving overnight, her father and brother locking down the jewelry store just in case, Bill hiding cash in the cedar chest. But alone in her house, there are moments for Sadie when everything drops away. There’s the sudden arrival of geese, a sound not immediately beautiful but compelling nonetheless, the squawks a wild yearning. Then they stop, and you can imagine yourself light, unencumbered. The sensation is temporary but seems permanent; you can’t hear anything but birds’ wings and the northern breeze and rustle of browning leaves. Angora clouds dip low and white and gray, and the geese pass south.

  CHAPTER 7

  Lillian

  1927–29

  It wasn’t always the handsome men Lillian wanted: she liked a certain assurance, a scent, the way ordinary men were transformed by desire. How beautiful they became, their bodies shimmering, muscular legs stretching, broad backs and thick arms bending around her, cocks hard in the dimness of hotel rooms, balls delicate against her thighs. She chose men who only in private revealed their sweeter natures: all had unforgiving lives, all wanted forgiveness. Even, it seemed, begged for such a thing, not simply sex but the transcendence sex might confer, a wild impossible blessing. Was it delusion, seeing them this way? Imagining her fingers slipping past a man’s ribs, palm cupping his heart. She wanted that and in certain moments, the men—their faces bathed in yearning— seemed to want it too. But for all their spur-of-the-moment appearances and near-desperate fucking and orgasmic proclamations I love you Lillian I love you Lillian oh Lillian Lillian oh—the men quickly vanished, never left their wives. It was a story she’d heard elsewhere. How it became hers she did not know.

  But one way or another, your life unspools. Lillian saw the ways it could go. Take her parents, her father oafish and generous and dead; her mother fish-pale and morose, an ineffectual, complaining woman. Carp under river ice, nibbling ancient disappointments. The smallest pleasures—hot bath, tea, orange dusk through the bare elms—dissipated in Lillian’s mother’s house. Lillian could, at least, choose her own loneliness: at seventeen she took a tiny flat, a job as a shop clerk.

  Years tick. You pass certain men in the street. Some you pull into your body, briefly, always too briefly, singular tastes and scents with you even when you’re sure you have forgotten. And then, at a holiday party, a wedding reception, there’s the quick peck on the cheek, close enough for you to catch the scent again. A sexual thrill rushes through you: you have to brace against it as the next in line, maybe his wife, maybe his daughter, also kisses your cheek, and other men you have known and their wives look on.

  In 1927, the year she turned thirty-six, Lillian was plush. Zaftig. Dark lipstick, flowery perfumes, plunge-neckline blue satin and beautiful shoes. In a tiny shop off Main Street, Kaplan’s, she sold stationery, fountain pens, account ledgers, dark leather diaries. When Abe Cohen appeared, she made no assumptions: for years he had lived on the outskirts of her thinking. Dull. Handsome. Relentlessly upstanding. A friend of her older brother’s, respectable in ways Moshe was not. A family man, which is to say he slaved to bring his wife over from Russia, then kept her pregnant for a decade, his life increasingly obscured by that strange brood of daughters, one pleasure-loving son. There had once been rumors— a romance with a Polish girl before his wife arrived—dusty now, insignificant. He himself insignificant but for his jewelry store, display cases stocked with opals, rubies, diamond studs, pearls she could pull across her tongue.

  “Hello.” Abe Cohen smiled, removed his hat, and made a show of examining leather-bound account books and watermarked paper. He sorted through the ivory letter stock and asked, “Would you like tea?” his English accented but precise.

  “Pardon?”

  He gestured at the street. “Miss Schumacher, would you like a cup of tea?”

  His thumb moved across the ivory paper in small deliberate circles. Cultured pearls, she thought, tea? He dampened his lips with his tongue, and his gaze was direct, chestnut. She’d forgotten his eyes were chestnut, if she had ever known. Bits of white in his hair now, charcoal overcoat like an unbuttoned pelt and beneath it the three-piece suit. Trim for his age, trim for any age except boy and the thumb circling and circling, and when had he unbuttoned the coat? Fedora in his left hand, deeper charcoal. “May I take you to tea?” A soft grit in his voice—this was what sold jewelry to women, of course, that landscaped baritone, and the three-piece suit with all the buttons suggesting their opposite, a continued unbuttoning, and those thumbed circles on the notepaper saying what he meant by tea.

  His wife was ill, she’d heard, failing. “That’s kind of you,” she said. This was the moment to decline, or at least steer their meeting to a public venue, sanctioned commiseration: How is your wife today? Is she feverish? Walking? Eating? Can she take soup? Tea and pastry. He had beautiful hands. She wanted to touch his mouth, the point on his lip he reached for with his tongue. “I would like that.”

  She closed the shop early, aware of him watching her hands as she locked the windowed oak door, pulled on her leather gloves, wrapped her blue scarf around her neck. He stood out on the sidewalk a respectful distance, easily a chaperone sent by her brother. When did she decide? In a shopping bag, she carried a box of notepaper and a box of envelopes. The air smelled of snow, the daylight weak behind pillow
ing gray clouds. Wind pushed east from the lake. She hesitated. Paper in paper in snow, she thought. Wet scraps. He was pressing his tongue against his upper lip. “Would you mind if I stopped home?” She gestured at the shopping bag.

  She didn’t pause in the foyer of her building, even when he fell behind her, slowed, presumably readying to wait. He followed her up the stairs to the second floor and her apartment. And she was thinking then of the cold outside and the heat of her apartment, the charcoal coat and the buttons, forgetting already his larger life, almost forgetting the tearoom down the street. Please come in, she said and he removed his overshoes and followed her into the small parlor. A reserved breathiness to him. Lillian touched her palm to his right cheek, and he kissed her hand and then her mouth. There was no hesitation, only a brief awkwardness in the undressing: her fingers pulling open his shirt buttons, Oh, his checked step back, as if he’d always undressed himself. His face bore the near-drunk, desperate expression of men who have been fighting desire and have given over to it—men who might later soberly admit I have broken a commandment—tiresome as that was. Best to see him with this expression, beyond caring. In her bed he entered her and moved slowly and then rapidly, climaxing quickly. He touched her for an hour, then rose and washed and kissed her forehead and left.

  Two weeks later he reappeared, plied her with cakes from a Polish bakery and good gin smuggled from Canada, moved his fingers over her face and kissed her on the mouth, all gratitude and lust, before running his hands over her breasts and belly and down between her legs, stroking then entering her: it was staggering and deeply pleasurable, bitter to relinquish.

  IN THE FIRST MONTHS, Abe’s courtship seemed to her a kind of truth, his attentions and her pleasure contradicting all absence. Sheyna he called her, beautiful one, and during their hours together she believed him. How easily she could forget all previous court-ships, the fickle nature of men and romance, the impermanence of passion, the moment at which unalloyed sweetness begins to change. Abe liked ritual, and in the first months held to the rituals of cake and gin and tenderness, intense sex during which his desire seemed to meet her own. But in the spring Abe came to her restless and unhappy and without gifts. She offered him holiday wine, which he refused. What he wanted was hard and unsparing: he took her from behind, not kissing her, not looking her in the eye. It was something men did. Oh, she thought, this. She gave over to him and her body seemed a separate thing and she dissolved beneath him. He wanted her to say Yes, I like it. “Yes, I like it,” she said, both lying and in some way meaning it. A strange release when he pinned her down, as if she had reached the end of fear. Her lungs refilled only after he’d left her apartment. He returned the next week with fruit and chocolate, kissed her, caressed her, and did not mention his previous visit.

  No one seemed to notice the affair, Abe’s biweekly visits to Lillian’s apartment, although he was known in her neighborhood. Or perhaps no one would believe it of Abe, who after all was her brother’s dear friend, a man suffering the burden and sorrow of his wife’s illness. Lillian did not meet him in public or ask for more time. She did not want Rebecca Cohen’s life: she wanted Abe as she had found him in her flat that first day, a man shaken loose from the world, immersed in the pleasures and wilder demands of his body and hers. For the first year, the trysts at her apartment were enough. For the first year she did not stop seeing other men.

  AND THEN ANOTHER January.Rebecca Cohen collapsed on a streetcar and was confined to bed. This was the word from Lillian’s sister-in-law Bertha, the word in the markets and beauty parlors. A brief note from Abe: my wife is ill. And nothing. Slow ticking days, desire accumulating, a honeyed thickness becoming ever more dense, the surface of each hour coated with the repeating question where’s Abe where’s Abe where’s Abe, which did not stop when she drank or slept. And sleep was instead a drifting, the bed an ice floe, lake winds pushing her farther and farther into arctic realms. She tried the remedies she knew: bootleg gin, reefer, mechanical sex with other men, not-Abe, through which the thrumming persisted, without return or release. There seemed no end to her awareness of him in the world. Downtown, almost daily, she saw walking reminders: his daughters, a small army, everywhere. The sourest one, Jo, now worked in Moshe’s law office; the strangest, Celia, wandered the city, regularly stopping at Kaplan’s to touch and sometimes steal sheets of paper. The librarian, Goldie, was forever at the druggist buying syrups and pills for her mother; Sadie, the stylish one, appeared at dress shops Lillian preferred. American girls, really—deliberately American, their accents perfectly local. Two daughters had his eyes, the others his mouth and brow but favored Rebecca, whom Lillian now thought of only as her. This required effort. At the butcher shop, the fruit market, in department stores and tearooms, in the beauty parlor, the post office, on streetcars, in the lobby of the Hippodrome, women clucked and murmured Poor Rebecca, and Rebecca’s girls look pinched (hadn’t they always?) and Rebecca’s Abe is so pale, poor Abe.

  By mid-February Lillian was half-eaten with desire and mute grief. What reprieve she found came late at night when the arctic drifting deepened, and the night seemed a translucent haze, bits of other winters resurfacing as if new: a burgundy reading chair, air colored by men’s voices—her father, his friends—boisterous and gravelly-sweet, tobacco smoke, hot tea. Peppermints. Her father’s tone of hilarity, his off-key singing, his callused hand resting on the crown of her head. The chair and voices and smoke blurred into a single feeling pulled from that other decade, a feeling as immediate as the streetlight through her bedroom window or her white quilt or the freckles on her forearm. And yet it was intangible, a feeling yoked to empty space.

  The hazy merging of then and now quietly leaked from a night into a morning, and then into a day, and another day, as Abe’s absence solidified. On Main Street, Lillian would hear and immediately lose not Abe’s baritone but a graveled laugh—perhaps the exact laugh she remembered, or a stranger’s, or just a misinterpreted squeal of streetcar brakes. The burgundy chair would swim up at her while she restocked sheets of onionskin, as if it had been there all along, waiting for her; as if it might even restore the tea and tobacco smoke and peppermints, the gravelly voice, the hand on her head, all of what she could and could not name. Say the burgundy chair was waiting for her, say it was that chair—would the room and by extension the house it had occupied also wait for Lillian? There was a single Brunswick Boulevard address, a house her father had chosen and paid for, a house her mother inherited and from which Lillian had fled. Yet in her mind there seemed two separate houses, one she wanted to visit and one she did not. Was one hidden inside the other? Throughout the city, snow fell in thick flakes, day after day, and the wind came in off the lake, the air itself blurring, and on these, the blurriest of days, it seemed possible the Brunswick house was still her father’s. On a Friday evening Lillian set out through the snow to the two-story wood-frame off Humboldt Parkway, the painted steps and snow-drifted porch and thick brass mezuzah in the doorway convincingly belonging to the house of memory.

  Lillian’s mother appeared in the doorway in a dark blue dress and glass beads, lipstick brightening her face, but the red mouth shifted between a flat pucker and a frown. She kissed Lillian on the cheek, an unfishy kiss. Lillian tried to decide what parts of her mother to believe: the kiss or the furrowed brow and intermittent frown. And what parts of the house to believe. The kitchen smelled of bread and roast chicken; in the dining room, the linen tablecloth was spread, the table set with her mother’s wedding silver and white china and brass candlesticks. But the living room seemed eerie and hard to navigate: three card tables covered with jigsaw puzzles—half an Eiffel Tower and two scrambled landscapes— occupied the space between the sofas. Porcelain figurines of forest animals crowded the old bookshelf and mantel. And where was the chair? Had there ever been a burgundy chair?

  Isabel lit the candles and murmured the Sabbath blessings, and the frown and furrowing vanished. She must have been beautiful, Lillian thoug
ht, and it seemed a new thought, though her mother had been called beautiful and still sometimes was. During Isabel’s prayer, you could almost see her as someone else, someone gracious. The house as that peppermint house. Then the blessings ended and Isabel’s mouth reverted to a carp’s and she took the carving knife to the chicken. “Nice you decided to visit, Lillian,” she said. “And for Shabbos. Who would have guessed.”

  “I wanted to see you,” Lillian said, but the you wobbled.

  “So you say. Good Shabbos,” Isabel said. “You need money you go see your brother Moshe.”

  Lillian felt a sharp prickle in her temples. Already, the beginnings of headache, her beautiful forgetting unraveling. How fast the turn—had it always been this fast? Had the Brunswick house ever been anyone’s but Isabel’s? In the dining room’s flat coolness, fishmouthed Isabel slapped potatoes onto wedding plates, and below the aromas of dinner lurked the house’s trace scents of ammonia and talc and chicken fat. As always. The absence of deeper voices as always, a bitter, heart-stopping always. How could Lillian have thought otherwise? In her belly she felt a sharp pull, an impulse to hit. “I don’t need money,” she said, and reached for the sweet wine.

  “You going to bring me more of that?” Isabel said. “I got that from Rabbi Greenberg.”

  “Moshe will. I brought you paper from the shop.”

  “Paper I can buy,” Isabel said. “But thank you.”

  “If you don’t want it, Ma, I’ll take it with me.”

  “Did I say thank you? I like the paper. It’s good what you bring.”

  And maybe good suggested another opening, slim, evanescent but still a crack in a door through which Lillian might see through her mother to her father. She waited, ate in silence. The chicken tasted of rosemary and onion and salt, there were roast carrots, and Isabel set out honey for the challah. Poppy seed cake. Strong tea, which Lillian cut with lemon.