The First Desire

by Nancy Reisman

  “What were you doing?” Jo says.

  “Nothing,” Celia says. “Good-bye.”

  When Jo hesitates, Celia starts to hum. And it is safe to leave her now: she’ll stay in her room for the rest of the afternoon. It’s what she does after being humiliated.

  Jo’s been away from the office two hours: she’ll have to work late. When she returns, she tells Lucia, “My sister is unwell.”

  “Oh no.” Lucia’s neck and face flush pink.

  “Sorry to leave you alone here.”

  Lucia shakes her head. “I’ll pray to St. Michael.”

  And then they are both typing, there is only the sound of typing and breathing, the occasional shuffling of paper, a suggestion of leaves.

  IT’S NOT the first time Lucia has mentioned saints: the Blessed Virgin Mary, St. Francis, St. Luke, St. Vincent de Paul, St. Joseph, St. Agnes, St. Catherine, St. Nicholas, St. Michael, St. Stephen, St. Mark, St. Antony, St. Jude. She’s studied their lives and deaths, talks of them as if they lived next door. When Lucia describes their torments, Jo sees a chorus of macabre dolls, most of them missing parts.

  But no, Lucia tells her, after death they are restored. After death they are beautiful and holy.

  “St. Cecilia,” Lucia says, “unsuccessfully beheaded.”

  THAT SUNDAY, Jo wakes early, thinking of Lucia’s wrists, the point just below her palm where the veins branch, slim bones, delicate skin, imprint of cologne. Jo’s walking up Delaware when the bells begin, stitching Sunday together. St. Everything, ringing in tandem. If you let yourself into the heart of the city and walk, the calls come from the neighborhoods.

  Once, last year, the windows of her father’s jewelry store were soaped with CHRIST KILLERS in Polish. Catholics, and not the first with their threats and profanity and soap. But imagine Lucia in her yellow dress, her hands extended, those sweet wrists, while the bells multiply, the chimes hovering over Lucia and her mother and their army of saints, Lucia praying to St. Michael for Celia’s health, Lucia with her eyes closed, mouthing the Rosary, mouthing Hail Mary Mother of Grace. Picture her in the grass, Mother of Grace, she says, black hair loose against the green. Her saints descend and rise, miraculous, their eyes restored, their breasts intact, necks swan-like, uncorrupted. They are blessing the onions. They are feeding the birds.

  Jo follows the bells. Thick clouds slide over St. Louis’s elaborate spire, the door of the church opens into—what? A dark vestibule, beyond which Jo cannot see, only invent. Outside: pale husbands in tight suits, wives—brunette, earnest, fake flowers pinned to their hats—herding children who are scrubbed miniatures of the parents, all of them approaching the entry with careful steps. The door closes and the sounds of the pipe organ leak out into the street. Once Mass has begun, Jo ascends the stone stairs, touches the thick door, and sniffs the air, which smells like evaporating rain and wax and libraries. Illumination, Lucia says. Miracles can happen anywhere. As the organ bleats and Latin harmonies rise from the choir, Jo closes her eyes and leans into the door.

  That night, when Jo is alone again, she conjures the thick wood and old rain and thinks yes, Lucia illuminated, floating in the yellow dress, holding out her hands, offering buttons and transcendence. Wind pulls at the dress, there’s a dampness between Jo’s legs. In the vision, Jo is wearing a brown fedora. She’s near enough to touch Lucia’s hem.

  IN DAYLIGHT, Jo types pleadings and imagines the texture of Lucia’s skin, while Lucia organizes files and takes letters for a jittery, myopic attorney named Feigenbaum. As usual, Feigenbaum leans too close to Lucia; Jo’s impulse is to swat him away. She turns instead to the windows, imagines the neckline of Lucia’s dress plunging, Jo herself sailing up to the highest branches of the elms. An unaccustomed lightness overtakes her.

  Such pleasure feels new, addictive. The elms, Jo tells herself, remember the elms, and her fantasies multiply, deepen by the day: Lucia beneath the trees in Delaware Park, her dress gauzy and sheer; Lucia in repose, waking in a low-lit bedroom, her breasts exposed, repeating Jo’s name in a voice laced with desire. The fantasies multiply despite Lucia’s long hemlines and safe necklines and careful office behavior, intensify with the thrill of secrecy, a giddy ache that overcomes Jo at the typewriter. They multiply despite all signs that Lucia—with her talk of gabardine and linen, infant nephews, holiday cooking—is really no different from Minnie Greenglass before marriage, no different from Sadie, who comes around with her baby in a pram, who enters the house and sighs, tells Jo to see a dentist, a hairdresser, a tailor, who makes Celia wash her face and bribes her with cakes and leaves, back to her husband, her marital bed, her mah-jongg games and flower arrangements and charitable works. Jo pretends otherwise, imagines the dark thatch between Lucia’s legs. Pretends the saints, in all their eccentricity, hold sway. Pretends that the ordinary is a disguise Lucia will shed in time.

  For now, Jo adopts disguises of her own. Clothes are only clothes, but the ones she wears—heavy cotton dresses dulled from wash—will get her nowhere with Lucia. In early June she counts out her savings and shops downtown Main Street, acquires a pale blue suit, a cream-and-plum-striped dress, three blouses in pastel and white, a beige skirt, new leather pumps. Visits a beauty parlor on Hertel, where a plump, efficient woman named May cuts and curls her hair and insists on regular appointments.

  “Beautiful,” Lucia says, and fingers the sleeve of Jo’s silk blouse. Wonders aloud if it’s French. Offers Jo a lipstick. And Jo takes the tube, peers into Lucia’s compact, and dabs the color on her mouth. Lucia hovers, waiting for the result.

  “Pink Bouquet,” Lucia says. “That’s you.”

  For the moment, Jo accepts this: she is as much Pink Bouquet as anything else. A small price for Lucia’s approval.

  On Friday night, when Celia lights the candles, Jo silently prays to the candlesticks and the tin ceiling, Blessed art Thou, O Lord our God, bless and keep Lucia and bring her to me. But then her father barks the other blessings, his tone of accusation seeping into the food. Irving opens a second bottle of sugary wine, having drained the first: he’s sloppy and loud, though harmless. The ceiling does not change, the table does not change, and Jo thinks, fleetingly, of shul—services? should she go?—and then, depressingly, of Minnie Greenglass.

  HOW LONG will it take? How long before Lucia can see Jo as Jo cannot even see herself? Consecutive Sundays, Jo dresses simply, pins on a small blue hat, sits across from St. Gregory’s, St. Michael’s, St. Joseph’s and watches the parishioners arrive. On a weekday afternoon she walks into St. Mary of Sorrows. There is a scattering of women, each alone, in separate church pews. A table of candles beside the Virgin Mary, a city of small flames, leaning and nodding in the slight draft. One of the women crosses herself and kneels to the Virgin, leaves a coin in the box and lights a candle. When she’s gone, Jo leaves a coin and lights one of her own, as if she speaks the language of the Virgin. As if Mary might recognize her longing and dispense grace.

  At home, Jo’s father seems to recognize nothing. He does not mention the blue suit, the lipstick, the stylish sweep of her bangs. Not her new pumps or his missing fedora or the tobacco she has recently pinched from his tin. He does not look at her the way he looks at Sadie—appraising, pleased—despite the white silk. It’s too late for that; how long has she deliberately made herself plain? He regards her as if she were a kitchen table. Reminds her to fix the loose porch rail.

  Irving follows their father’s lead, gives her suit a glance, shrugs. Only Celia remarks: she stands in doorways, holding the cat, sizing up Jo’s clothes, assessing her face. Pretty one, Celia says. You are the prettiest one.

  “JO, TAKE A LETTER,” Moshe Schumacher says, flicking his eyes over the plum-and-cream dress. “Well. You got yourself a beau?” and she smiles at him the way Lucia smiles at him, calm, benign, follows him to his office, sits in the side chair taking shorthand while he paces and gestures with thick hands. Today she feels as if she’s inhabiting someone else’s skin, a body over her own.
Only her fingers are recognizable. Worth it, she tells herself, and begins the second letter, her notes fast and fluid, and words imprinting themselves and drifting: Dear, it is a pleasure, when we next meet, I remind you, please call, I look forward, most sincerely.

  At her desk, typing, she glances over to Lucia, who is explaining Attorney Levy’s handwriting to Attorney Levy. Lucia rolls her eyes at Jo, smiles. In that moment, what else does Jo need? most sincerely a pleasure. most sincerely, please join me. most sincerely, yes. In the afternoon, Moshe Schumacher leaves for court. The other attorneys are burrowed in their offices, and Lucia stands beside Jo’s desk, her dress a field of white dots over peach.

  “What Mr. Schumacher asked,” Lucia says, “about a beau?” Drops her voice to a near whisper. Her face is flushed, she’s absently stroking a loose strand of hair. Smiles. And for an instant, Jo hovers at the edge of anticipated joy, up in the elms, Lucia floating, they are far from the office and the house on Lancaster, they are falling into the grass, Jo immersed in the green of the lawn, the black of Lucia’s hair. There’s a two-second delay before Jo registers the name Anthony, which Lucia embroiders with sighs. A city clerk, Lucia says, eyes the color of walnuts. On Wednesdays after work Lucia does not go to Mass, but instead meets this clerk, who buys her cups of coffee and rides the streetcar with her back to her neighborhood.

  Jo’s throat dries and she’s overcome by a choking sensation, like fishbones needling her esophagus. “That’s lovely,” she says. There’s a slight distortion in the sounds from the street, a whining echo, and the light in the room splits into patches, which seem to swim away from each other.

  “It’s still a secret.” There’s a low thrill in Lucia’s voice. “He hasn’t met my father yet.”

  “You look happy.” Jo searches for a handkerchief, then pretends she is backlogged with her work for the day. She squints at her own shorthand, coughs, leaves the room to fill a glass with water. Her slip clings to her thighs as she walks, the dress moving as her body moves, though it seems to be someone else’s. In the ladies’ room she splashes water on her face. It will not last, she tells herself. She ignores the water glass and drinks from her hands. Surely Lucia will not fall for the polite door-opening, for the cups of coffee and escorts home, transparent rituals that mean nothing. This Anthony will exit Lucia’s life as quickly as he’s entered it. Perhaps he will prove himself unworthy. Perhaps he will die. Jo regains control of her throat, slicks on the Pink Bouquet, crosses the hall to the office. “Your dress,” she tells Lucia. “Lovely.”

  For a few hours, a numb calm descends, a state Jo associates with frostbite and emergencies. She stays late at the office, and after Lucia leaves, after the last client and even the attorneys leave, she crosses the room to the desk along the wall and opens Lucia’s cabinet of active files. Her hands move over the folders, fingers pick at documents and pull them out, a simple shifting of rectangles. She takes a real estate agreement from the Saltzman file and slides it into the Schwartz file.

  On the streetcar home, Jo’s exhausted. She stumbles into the house and up to bed. Dusk: the afternoon’s seeped away through the trees, which are black against a backdrop of indigo. The streetlight casts a yellow the color of bruises almost healed. New rain, honeysuckle blooming on the side of the house. It makes you yearn the way the radio symphony does, the way Lucia’s wrists do. And then Celia’s in the bedroom doorway calling, “Jo? What about dinner?”

  In the morning, while the house is hers, Jo tries on her father’s spare fedora, soft brown darkened by rain, slightly misshapen. For a while, her face assembles itself. For a while the desire to break out of her body abates.

  IN SUMMER, Celia spends whole days in the garden: this seems to keep her out of trouble. But if it rains for too long, Celia’s agitated, distraught; she paces, chews her hair. “What is it?” Jo asks her. “What now?” When Jo gets home from work, Celia demands to play gin rummy and checkers, games she quickly abandons. Bad signs, Jo knows, but who can keep track? It’s enough to make dinner, brew the eight o’clock tea. Jo smokes her father’s tobacco on the back porch while the rain falls and Celia rants: today the postman ignored her. But evening company is not enough for Celia, not if the rain persists, which it does. In the morning, she follows Jo to work. Not the first time: occasionally, Jo buys her coffee and sends her home. But now the streetcar lurches, the passengers lurch, the scents of lake water, soap, wet leather shoes mix with old smoke while Celia breathes into Jo’s ear, “You hate me, don’t you?”

  “Not this,” Jo says. “Why aren’t you home?”

  “I hate you too,” Celia says.

  “Don’t be stupid,” Jo says. “You hate the rain.”

  “Stupid,” Celia says. “That’s what you think.”

  “What is it you want? You want a Danish?”

  “Hate,” Celia says. “The truth is out.” She points to a young man hunched over a newspaper. “He doesn’t hate me.”

  It’s the sort of maneuver that can escalate in seconds: harassment of strangers, angry conductors, annoyed police. The man wisely stays hunched. “Let’s get off,” Jo says.

  “No. I’m riding. I paid.”

  What choice does Jo have? She takes the streetcar past her office stop and uptown again, rain pummeling the packed car, until Celia calms down and Jo can get her home. But it’s a lost day. Jo persuades Celia to change into dry clothes—“I don’t hate you. Try this dress”—brews tea, and, at Celia’s request, rolls out pie dough, washes strawberries, measures sugar. When the pies are in the oven, Jo chews a finger of horseradish. Her body seems to flatten and gray until its lines are indistinguishable from the walls. It’s only the horseradish, the daily tobacco, reminding her she is separate.

  Celia sits on the porch and hums. Water draining from the roof ticks over garden tools and mud. Once the rain stops, she moves down to the flower beds. Yellow print cotton dress, thick apron, bare feet. She’s pulling weeds from between wet calla lilies, damp patches spreading over her dress. The peonies are blooming, the grass is again thick, seductive. Watching Celia move through the yard, Jo can almost forget her wildness. She’s almost a picture of holy.

  Wine helps. After dinner, even when there is no rain, Jo pours herself the sugary kosher wine; a glass or two and the day’s disturbances retreat. Trouble appears as if on the far shore of the river, tiny, increasingly remote: city clerks waving to Lucia, Celia’s petty thefts. From the near shore you can sift through Lucia’s stories, decide what to save, what to erase: the Archangel Gabriel, leading the Herald Angels; St. Agnes, the Virgin, accused of witchcraft; Anthony the clerk bringing snapdragons to Lucia’s mother. When Lucia speaks, her face seems incandescent. Keep that. Keep Agnes’s death sentence, the white and yellow snaps, the singing angels. Forget St. Cecilia’s damaged neck. Let the rest blur and fall away.

  IT’S JULY, a Sunday at Old St. Joseph’s: Jo’s across the street, beside a sycamore. Parishioners arrive, dark suits in the heat, long dresses and small hats, automobiles parking with slow deliberation. Jo no longer watches their faces, only their bodies moving through the heavy air, the fluttering arms of the women, the solemn gaits of the men. But her reverie is interrupted by the O of Lucia, today in deep blue, hair pinned beneath a matching hat with a tiny veil, a flock of family around her. Lucia does not look at the street or the sycamore, but ahead to the entrance of the church, increasing her pace. Follow her gaze and there he is, a handsome suit holding a hat, hair a cap of black, dark eyes and long lashes floating above a flash of teeth. A body bending toward her, and she toward him, he is bowing to the family at the door, he is taking her arm in their presence. The church entry swallows them and they do not reappear. The door closes. Jo waits for it to reopen, but of course it does not; the service begins and she paces. Her legs move independently, carrying her in circles around the church, up one block and down the next: up over down across, up over down across. The breeze increases and she is a thin vertical line moving over the horizontal of the sidewal
k, the city is a scattering of rays, and the sky fills with its customary banks of clouds, occasional patches of blue among the bloated layers. She breaks into even finer lines—arms, fingers, legs—all in flat continuous motion down one side street, up another, now away from the church and onto broader avenues, until she’s in front of a department store on Main Street. Only there does she notice her location and the blank interval that brought her from Old St. Joseph’s. Think. Think. She can imagine the route as if to give directions, but not today’s version, not the particulars of open windows and parked cars and broken curbstones. The sky seems half-familiar. Did she walk the whole way or was there, at some point, a streetcar? She cannot remember a streetcar. This isn’t like her, she’s never lost time this way; it’s Celia who appears at unplanned destinations, forgetting how she got there, panic in her face when you ask what happened.

  SUPPER AND COLLAPSE, sweat and collapse, bitter insomnia, stifled weeping, open weeping, sharpness in the belly: two days. Two days of moving from the bed only to relieve herself and make her way back, of pretending Father, I am ill with flu. Best to stay away. Celia hovers outside the door, disappears, returns with water Jo will not drink, toast she ignores, dense berry pie, cold tea, souring glasses of milk.

  By Tuesday night Jo is empty, body slack, worn-out. No weeping, no tremors, no waves of nausea, just an awareness of indigo air and the outlines of curtains. Eventually she sleeps. Wednesday morning, when she sits at the edge of the bed, the room appears to have shifted, but how? The bureau, framed pictures, and rocking chair remain themselves. The glass cover of a bookshelf is open— as she left it? Clock tick, faucet drip, barking dog, footsteps on the street, insect fizz. Ordinary, expected sounds. Where was she? Already a blank. She closes her eyes and sees blotches of light shaped like pits and fruit. Where? A vague, untouchable there, and didn’t there include a woman? A line of color, white or perhaps blue? Pale blue or something deeper?