The First Desire

by Nancy Reisman

  Three weeks later, Goldie Cohen disappeared.

  CHAPTER 8

  Goldie

  1929

  All year, to the east: construction of the Central Terminal, vast enough for eight train lines. Deafening, and yet the cacophony suggested its opposite: beyond the engine drones and shattering booms, the hammers, the grating of shovels, beyond the shouts and mud suck and raining dirt, an opening into silence. She could swim under the sound. It was a cathedral of noise, which seemed to solidify into an actual cathedral. And she began to be late to everything.

  In June Central Terminal opened, marble and brick rising into grand arches, sweep of the high-ceilinged concourse, four-faced clock a gleaming sentinel, and around it the polished kiosk stocked with magazines, cigarettes, chocolates, notions for travelers. Beyond: the row of gilded ticket vendor windows, dozens, like portals to other lives.

  When she walked into the terminal, indoors and outdoors blurred, the crowd purposeful and thick as shopping crowds on Main Street, and the sense of space barely diminished. The station’s ceiling domelike, sky blue with painted stars. In the diner the walls were a pattern of beacons and flames, black and white, red and green; in the Ladies’ Lounge marble tables flanked red leather divans; but what drew her most were the arched windows at the end of the long concourse, three stories high, daylight pressing into the station. Almost holy, they seemed. Ark of the Covenant, she thought, and weren’t all holy things more or less that blast of light? If only you could rise into it.

  She could not resist the new station. Visited quietly three days in a row, bought cigarettes there and sat in the elegant Ladies’ Lounge or at the slick onyx tables of the coffee shop, reading books and newspapers, studying the timetables, drinking coffee with cream. It was, she knew, the waiting room for other lives, but she couldn’t tell when the waiting would end. And her planning was the planning of a sleepwalker, half-conscious at best but progressing: money saved, clothes sorted, a small valise she bought secondhand. At Central Terminal, as in sleep, she was alone. And then in July, a quiet morning with a doorway in it: this time upon leaving the house on Lancaster she took the money and the valise. In the Ladies’ Lounge she dressed for the occasion in new clothes: a cream-colored hat, cream-colored veil, tiny sprigs of lavender tumbling through the fabric of her pale green dress. A ring of her mother’s. In her handbag she carried a small gold cross, the tiniest of disguises, just in case. She lined up at a ticket window and paid. Waited in view of the windows and the four-faced clock, and then in the balmy air out on the platform.

  It couldn’t be simpler, stepping onto the train. One foot on the narrow step, the other lifting from the platform and for a fraction of a second hanging in air and a porter offering her a hand. Then she was up to the next step and finding her way through a plush car of the Twentieth Century, the air, it seemed, propelling her to a seat upholstered in burgundy fabric, the window beside it open and the whistles and shouts from the platform seeping in. Passengers trundled in and rustled and adjusted, heaving bags onto overhead racks and hanging hats, accompanied by the smell of sweat, coffee, tobacco, hair oil, shaving soap, peppermints, face powder, mustard, apple tart, hand salve; and they opened more windows as the train jolted south and west.

  EYES CLOSED, at first: there was the hypnotic motion and percussion of the train rocketing west. Eyes open and out the small square window blue patches of sky and familiar cumulus billowing and beside the tracks flatlands and fields and warehouses and rows of stained brick buildings and ragged houses and then blue-gray lake and steel plants and more empty flats, then fields: pastureland and thick grass and low hills, farmland, the interruptions of towns. The endless green was at first elating and then, for brief instants, monstrous: it swelled up alarmingly, without end, and she was seized by the cold panic that such green could swallow her. She felt a choking and a wish for her mother. And then it passed, and in its place the recognition of absurdity: she would not be eaten by corn. More murk of industry and glimpses of lakeshore and green. Heat rising.

  She slept fitfully in the heat of the afternoon, a day ever hotter as the train crossed into the Midwest. Her body rocked with the train, longing rising in sleep, a liquid opening and clenching and rolling: Daniel’s skin and muscle, the rhythm of sex. She woke for the first time in years not in Buffalo or even in New York State but moving over Ohio. Woke in motion, as she had on the crossing. The train compartment had transformed into a momentary home, replacing in her mind the house on Lancaster. She was altered. There was the memory upon waking of Daniel’s fingers like water over her clavicle and breasts, mouth against her neck. The near sense of him still with her as the elderly woman in the next seat blew her nose and a redheaded boy sulked and his plump and elegant mother sighed. They didn’t seem to notice the wild tumult in Goldie, or if they noticed, it was too much to acknowledge. A public train, after all.

  Pears, Goldie thought. What she’d give for a pear, sweet slices on her tongue.

  She made her way to the dining car and settled at a table near the back and ordered tea. A few tables away a potato-faced man held forth about the future: he talked about beef, Midwestern cattle and the heaviness of winter. His hands dwarfed his coffee cup. He seemed inordinately pleased with himself, although his suit was the unfortunate color of crushed acorns. Goldie stirred sugar into her tea.

  By Toledo, she found that pinches of sadness expanded into waves. At the train station, a skinny woman in a navy blue dress mumbled and kicked a carpetbag; on the platform for the south-bound local, a girl slumped on a bench, dark hair falling lank in the heat. They could hear Goldie if she called to them and she wanted to, for a moment the desire fervent, but what could she possibly say? It was ridiculous, the impulse to call. In her head there were loose phrases, fragments of songs. Because of the heat, she thought. Past the railway percussion and squeal of brakes the tunes accumulated and broke off, leaving a few notes adrift. She’d been cultivating silence but now this, a desire for the simplest music.

  In Chicago she paused briefly but stayed in the train station. Then resumed, her train snaking west, Goldie deep in the center of it watching the fields and prairie unspool. The dust increased. After several stops she wanted to wash more thoroughly. She imagined swimming, ridding herself of clothes altogether. And though she could have disembarked in any city and taken a hotel room and bathed, she did not. Passed through the languorous heat of the plains, the great distance from water affecting her now. On the third day the landscape turned again: it made her thirsty simply to look at it. The midday sun was burning, sky relentlessly clear, and it seemed the earth could barely stand it, but in the evening as the train crossed farther west, the world turned peach, with streaks of magenta, and later a pure indigo.

  PART TWO

  Beyond Lancaster

  Early 1930s

  CHAPTER 9

  Sadie

  1931–32

  The smell of fried eggs nauseates Sadie (though raw eggs aren’t any better, it’s best not to bake) and the air at Lancaster smells precisely of fried eggs. It’s as if Jo senses her aversion and cooks eggs to spite her, waiting until Sadie’s parked in the driveway, then slapping butter into the skillet. The problem isn’t just Lancaster, of course, the nausea comes and goes, but you have to think ahead, choose your fastest exit, or else lose your breakfast of plain toast smack in the middle of the parlor.

  Today Sadie’s dropping off Celia’s birthday present, a lamb’s wool scarf and gloves, pale blue, very soft; but Celia is out, and Jo lurks, with her newspaper and the egg smell.

  “How are you, Jo?” Sadie sets Celia’s present on the piano bench. It’s warm in the parlor, much too warm with her heavy coat, and before she can unbutton it the queasiness overwhelms Sadie— she feels as if she’s been spun in fast circles and pummeled and dunked in vinegar. She rushes out the front door to the edge of the driveway, where she retches and wipes her mouth with a clean handkerchief and kicks new snow over her mess. The whole business is mortif
ying, her body having its way with her. She rummages through her pocketbook for a lipstick and crosses the snowy lawn to the front steps, the veranda, the door, where Jo stands peering out.

  “How you feeling, Sadie?” Neither kind nor unkind: it’s a scrim behind which another question lurks.

  Sadie hasn’t yet confessed her pregnancy to her family, though retching in the snow could be taken as a kind of admission. Of course she hasn’t wanted to tell any of them—they harass her enough about other things, about nothing, about their unhappiness with the weather—and she wants privacy; she likes the thick protective band of her family’s ignorance. The pregnancy is the most delicate of secrets, a gradually illuminating landscape only she and Bill perceive, a quiet euphoric alteration in the earth’s tilt. And she would like to stay in this deep wonder with Bill, forget the city, forget the families—but already the secret’s dispersing, the quiet interrupted. Unfair. Two nights ago, at dinner with Bill’s mother, the chicken Mother Feldstein cooked repulsed her, and Sadie could barely stay in the dining room. Mother Feldstein studied her for several minutes before offering a predatory smile. She addressed herself to Bill. “Well?” she said, and he blurted, “Sadie’s pregnant,” and Mother congratulated him, and then Sadie, and began what Sadie could only think of as her advice diatribe. At the end of the evening, Mother Feldstein patted Sadie on the belly, as if Sadie were herself an infant or, worse, a dog.

  Some of the other perceptual shifts unnerve her. She wonders if pregnancy makes you hallucinate. It’s possible, isn’t it? Last week at Lancaster, the stains on the kitchen floor and counter appeared to her as crawling insects. She tried to smash a spot of molasses dead with her shoe, and Celia asked if her feet were troubling her. Two days later she glimpsed through Lancaster’s front window a man walking inside the parlor, but the image was fleeting. She opened the door with her key and called and heard nothing. Then Jo appeared, annoyed. There was no man in the house: what she saw must have been a coat and hat, or a melding of the coatrack with some other movement. She could only blink. And then Jo became unnaturally polite, and offered Sadie coffee. The hospitality seemed so anomalous Sadie wondered if, miraculously, a man— a beau or someone less respectable than a beau—had visited Jo and slipped out the back. But there were no other signs. She said yes to the coffee, and followed Jo to the kitchen and gazed out at the yard, which was empty but for blown brown leaves and unremarkable squirrels and a few wayward branches.

  Today there are no fake insects, no elusive men. Only new snow, the neighborhood offering the reliable stasis of a photograph. The nausea has passed for now, and Sadie unbuttons her coat and reenters the foyer. Jo is waiting. “I’m fine,” Sadie says. She’ll tell the family soon, not today, but soon. “Thought I left the gift card in the Ford. I’ll stay just a minute.”

  “Sit down,” Jo says. “Relax.” And despite the air’s remaining whiff of egg, the suggestion has appeal. Sadie would like to sit quietly for a while; she wouldn’t mind a nap. But once she’s settled on the parlor sofa, it’s clear that there’s no sitting for the sake of sitting, and Celia’s birthday present isn’t quite enough in trade. Jo’s agitating for a new icebox. Their father says he can’t spare the money, but more than once the milk has spoiled. “You owe it to the family,” Jo says.

  Sadie owes the family quite a lot, it seems. She’d like to point out that Irving is the one who perpetually owes—he’s courting trouble now and she’s worried—but telling Jo will only magnify the trouble. “How often,” she says, “is the milk left out?”

  Jo narrows her eyes. “Never.”

  “I’ve seen it left out,” Sadie says, but Jo will have none of it. And now Sadie’s queasiness is rising again—even more unjust.

  “Aren’t you the Queen of Sheba,” Jo says. Sadie might just retch again—but what of breakfast could be left? She stands to leave. “You won’t even hear me out,” Jo says, and then she too is up from her chair, moving between Sadie and the door.

  “It’s not just my decision,” Sadie says.

  Jo stations herself in the foyer, rallying the heat and egg smell, and doesn’t budge.

  Air, Sadie thinks, ice and air. “I’ll talk to Bill.”

  Which is all it takes for Jo to step aside.

  PREGNANCY IS NOT something to be shamed by, she tells herself, though of course it’s the evidence of what happens between a husband and wife, proof of those nighttime romps Bill is so fond of. What was private seems alarmingly public, one’s body turning into a bright, expanding placard announcing Sex Was Here. And despite the certainty of public display, what sets it all in motion— the moment of conception—seems to her indistinguishable from many other moments. She wasn’t prepared for that: she’d imagined, absurdly, that she would “know” at the exact moment, and had never determined how. As if chimes would strike or a chorus of cherubs would sing from the mantel. For weeks in the fall, Bill was especially amorous and Sadie did not stop him, though she didn’t much drop into fever. Most of the time she was distracted by the messiness of sex, the unpleasant wet spots on the sheet, the liquid drip down her thighs, the routine reaching for towels or toilet tissue to clean up. She’s always cleaning up one thing or another, isn’t she? The inelegance of it—especially of cleaning down there —galls her, and thank God for long baths and for Bill’s reaction to her pregnancy: gentle restraint.

  It’s a lovely thing, restraint. Bill’s a man with a temper, not a violent temper but a temper of unfortunate and sometimes bellowing magnitude. Many men have such tempers, her father for instance, it’s not surprising to her, but the bellowing really does suggest a distressed cow. Or, she supposes, a bull, the way he booms her name when he’s upset, usually about her loans to Irving, or Celia wandering into his office, or inadequate attention to his mother. Too often she listens and makes soothing noises or no noise at all until he wears himself out. And his newfound—though temporary?—restraint is useful now, since Irving is in money trouble again. This time Moshe Schumacher’s son Leo came to her, warning that Irving’s gambling debt is too large, large enough that her father will soon hear of it, will be asked to pay on Irving’s behalf. Business is off, of course, everyone’s is, some jewelers have closed altogether. It’s an idiotic time to gamble, Irving knows that. She stops short of naming Irving himself an idiot.

  After dinner and dessert, after bathing, there’s Bill’s daily ritual of palming her belly—as if by his rubbing it, the baby will grow and emerge like a genie from a bottle. The gesture is oddly sweet. Bill’s hand is warm, and the warmth moves through her and, she imagines, through the baby. It’s soothing, as long as his fingers stay above her hips. Bill himself seems soothed and though she doesn’t want to break the spell, this is the best time to ask him about Irving. She tells him about the call from Leo Schumacher. Bill sighs and gazes at the bedroom ceiling—does he see cherubs?— apparently counting to ten, and manages to control his temper, love and cunning and pity seeping into his expression.

  “Darling,” he says. “Your father might have to help Irving.”

  “I don’t know if he can. And the fury.”

  “Mm-hmm,” Bill says.

  “Irving’s young, you know that.”

  “Foolish, Sadie, he’s foolish. I can’t pay for his nonsense.”

  “Will you at least talk to him?”

  “Sadie.”

  “Just talk.”

  He nods but his face is a deepening red. There will be no mention of iceboxes.

  HER BODY SWELLS in places she anticipated and places she did not. Her feet, for example: what does a growing baby have to do with your feet? Also her behind, which seems oddly square. It’s difficult to get a clear view, of course, and when she asks Bill he tells her she is beautiful and sometimes he waxes on about sons and mothers. She finds the “beautiful” sweet and mollifying, and the sons and mothers part a little enraging: Mother Feldstein? Is he thinking of Mother Feldstein, who does not after all like Sadie, and might be capable of stealing this baby aw
ay? Overfeeding it. Forcing it to breathe gardenia perfume and withstand Mother Feldstein herself, whose behind is overly prominent and definitely square, the collateral effect of four sons and a single unhappy daughter. And Sadie has a sudden wave of sympathy for her dour, insufferable sister-in-law, Nora.

  “We might have a girl,” Sadie says.

  “Well of course,” Bill says. And after a moment, “a beautiful girl.”

  And though she finds herself on the verge of tears—why tears? why now? she can’t possibly be crying over the squaring off of her behind, can she?—she knows better than to pursue boy or girl? with Bill. It’s no surprise that he’s thinking of sons. He’s already mentioned his father’s name, Jacob, and his grandfather’s name, Samuel, as possibilities. She’s thinking of colors, of pastel pink and yellow. She’s seen boy babies and their fountains of urine: Delia Lefkowitz’s colicky Adam, her own brother. She loves Irving well enough, but she’d rather have a girl. A smart, good-natured, utterly sane girl, the sort she imagines her mother was. Is it odd not to want, first, a little Bill? But clearly Bill can do that kind of wanting for both of them.

  Sadie’s monthly calls to the police, the ads in out-of-town papers, have become routine, detached, it seems, from the Goldie she knew, and she isn’t sure why the Goldie of childhood is so much with her now: Goldie who was often brusque, combing out Sadie’s hair with hard tugs despite Sadie’s objections and tears. But in other moments she was kinder and tended to stare out the window at stray light on the maples. The thought of the light and the trees and Goldie moved by light and trees—even a mean young Goldie moved by light and trees—is enough to push Sadie to the brink, she’s sniffling and blowing her nose and a swarm of tears is blurring the bedroom. No word. No word. Sadie tries to train her mind on the image of Goldie as a tourist in New York or Chicago, but the image fragments and gives way to more bewilderment and blurriness. Pregnancy is one puddle after another, Sadie thinks. All you can do is follow doctor’s orders, have the seamstress alter your clothes and purchase maternity dresses that billow like parachutes. Don’t give up on lipstick.