Sadie nods and for an instant her jaw tightens. “My father?” she says.
“He never mentions her.”
“Today I told him I wanted to speak with him about Goldie. ‘She’s alive,’ I said. ‘The dead are dead,’ he told me, and walked away.”
Lillian nods. “That sounds about right. That’s what he’d say.”
“Will you talk to him?”
All that effort to steady himself, all that fervent prayer, the reservoir of things he does not say slowly burning in him. The unspeakable daily reports. Goat goat goat. Another man would accept news of Goldie as a gift, even after all this time, but another man would not have declared her dead. Abe himself is perched on the brink and wobbling. Could he embrace Goldie even if he wanted to? Lillian cannot imagine it. More likely he’ll dismiss anyone who forces the matter, though more estrangement is untenable.
“She’s his daughter,” Sadie says, an open plea.
“Sadie, you want me to interfere. This matter is too private.”
“But for Goldie,” Sadie says.
“Has Goldie asked you this?”
“No.”
“So this is what you wish.”
“Shouldn’t he know?”
Of course he should, but does should matter? He’s chosen, more than once, and is it Sadie’s place to decide now? “It won’t do any good,” Lillian says.
“How do you know?”
“I know.”
“Have you tried?”
And she did try, in another lifetime it seems, when Goldie disappeared: first coaxing Abe to wait a while, Moshe too telling him, There’s no need to hurry this, let the police investigate. Nor did she believe in the shivah, only that he had to go through with it. Beforehand, he’d been unreachable, a stone body, and after the shivah he reemerged, without lightness but at least himself. And years later, when he had grandchildren, she asked what if his eldest ever returned, and without anger he said, The dead are dead, Lillian. Rebecca I mourn. Rebecca’s name, as ever, a warning not to go further.
“I’m not as bad as you think,” Lillian says.
“I’ve insulted you.” There’s a quaver in Sadie’s voice. “I’m sorry.” She’s tearing up now, but it’s hard to know what she’s sorry for: this minor trespass with Lillian, or Goldie’s absence, the deep cold of January and the deeper cold abroad, the blank envelopes in the next room, or the way duress distorts her social grace. When she’s possessed of herself, Sadie will not want to remember this moment, this vulnerability with Lillian; as the women who cry in the store may later be standoffish, needing the shield of formality, perhaps resenting Lillian for witnessing what they would choose to forget. Or as men act after making love and returning to the world, distant, denying intimacy. Lillian has learned to behave as if nothing has transpired. And with Sadie there is, too, the element of refusal: it’s possible she’d have Lillian revert to Miss Schumacher. But now she is Lillian, and Sadie is bereft.
“Sadie, you have to understand. I have no influence here,” Lillian says. She offers Sadie a handkerchief, pours her a glass of water, and refills the sherry.
“I suppose I shouldn’t have asked,” Sadie says.
“I would have done the same.” It’s true; in loyalty you ask for all you can. Rudeness does not count. And Sadie is, if nothing else, loyal to Goldie, though hers is a loyalty mixed with other, veiled impulses. “The sherry’s not bad,” Lillian says. “I only keep it here in winter. A treat at the end of the day.”
“It’s very good.” Sadie’s gathering herself now, the teariness subsiding. “Bill would like it.”
“How is Bill? And your girls? “
“Fine,” Sadie says. “They’re all fine. Your brother? Bertha?” What does one say about Bertha? Here are the worries, here the bewilderment: unimaginable, how she—or anyone else—will ever be unburdened. But Sadie can do nothing about it.
“All right,” Lillian says. “Moshe and Bertha are fine.”
There is the slightest hesitation in Sadie. “I’m glad.” She gathers her hat and gloves. “We’ll see you at temple on Friday?” Her car is just outside, and although there’s snow, the streets aren’t bad yet. She wishes Lillian a good evening. And then she is gone.
Patience, Lillian thinks, goat. She pictures her house undisturbed and the cats sleeping, unaware of anything beyond the furnace heat and heavy sofa, the bowls of water, the bowls of food. The dead are dead. Tonight, Abe will stay with her. Their time is not infinite.
CHAPTER 18
Goldie
1943
The Japanese seamstress with the sandpiper walk has disappeared and in her wake there is a strange chattering rush: though no one speaks of her, it is as if her movements, that quick flightiness, have reshaped the town. Everyone walks and speaks more quickly, speeding versions of themselves. Or maybe it is simply the town filtered through Goldie’s own hurry, her pinched sense of nowhere to flee. The cities her mother desired, Warsaw and Paris, are impossible. All of Europe is impossible and worse. “Where can we go?” she asks Ted, the man she sometimes dates. He’s fifty-five and has fled only a marriage. “What are you talking about?” he says. “What’s wrong with here?”
In Venice Beach a carnival persists, patriotic, hysterical in its enthusiasms. The sailors show up days before their tours, the dance halls are filled with young girls kissing and even marrying new soldiers. She always prefers the more deserted hours and stretches of beach. She should not walk alone at night—Ted warns her, her friends tell her not to—but she likes the deepest dark, the blackouts, the starriness and the night’s accompanying clarities. Even the jagged-edged clarity that she’s afraid to ask about the seamstress.
And then there is a letter from Sadie, who is not the seamstress and knows nothing of the seamstress, but somehow the two moments link in Goldie’s mind, a seamstress has disappeared and Sadie—the real Sadie—has stepped out of the shadows after more than a decade. The envelope has the handwriting of formal invitation, the paper is dark cream. She recognizes the writing before she reads the return address, the beautiful script Sadie labored over when she was young. Nothing like Irving’s scrawl, which twice a year arrives on cards that are like glass, slick surfaces that offer only that everyone is fine, disaster has not struck. Goldie sits at the kitchen table and opens the letter with a butter knife. In it is a single page on which Sadie writes that she thinks of Goldie often and hopes she is well. Irving is in boot camp. It is kind of her to think of Celia. Sadie has two daughters (and here Goldie’s imagination fails, she can picture only two small Sadies). Goldie is of course welcome to visit any time, Sadie says, and includes the same unfamiliar return address.
Goldie has become a woman who rarely cries. It’s as if crying were finite, and she has completed that part of her life. But something is loosened by Sadie’s handwriting. There is the clear shape of Sadie’s life, suddenly real despite the vagueness and brevity of the letter. For reasons I cannot explain, Sadie said, but what does that mean? Perhaps the shock of Irving’s service convinced her to write. It’s never occurred to Goldie that Irving (the boy in the oak, the scrawler of cards) would serve, though she can find no reason beyond her own blindness and terror. He is still of fighting age, and as far as she knows a man without children, unmarried. But he is Irving, and he should not be in a war zone, none of them should. For an instant the idea of Irving at war merges with lost cities, as if at this moment Irving is pinned in occupied Paris. Irving is in boot camp, she reads again. There is a Georgia address.
You are welcome to visit any time. Is this what it takes then, a war, for Sadie to write? And now, when their lives are irrevocably separate. She pictures Sadie’s life as a tea service, china or silver; Sadie has no doubt become a woman of means, you can see it in the fineness of the notepaper, the confidence of the words. Goldie’s own life seems littered with driftwood and half-read books, and what would Sadie comprehend? But Sadie has written. It is far too late for Goldie to cross back, it is all far too late
, but Sadie has written. Once they were sisters: it is something, to have a sister.
She will write back to Sadie, a brief, careful note. Thank you, she’ll say, I live near the beach. Thank you, I am fine. But she would like to ask Sadie what has happened to the Japanese seamstress. She would like to ask where else there is to flee, if one should need another place. And also if Sadie is happy, if happy is a relevant word—just look at the girls and the soldiers at the pier—or if Sadie is not happy, what she thinks she is.
CHAPTER 19
Jo
1943
In winter Jo walks all the way to the jewelry store, just to walk, though the city is frozen: clear sky appears only during the deepest cold. Now she’s drawn by the blue, cold but compelling, a color to fly into. Since the air show last summer she’s been watching the sky more than usual, the shifts in the clouds, these rare open spans of blue; since the air show last summer she has imagined herself a pilot. She would choose this exact sky for flight, and the clothing to go with it: trousers, a short jacket, a cap like Amelia Earhart’s. Amelia is not dead, Jo’s sure, though her plane has been missing for years. Jo has worried for her but no, she’s not dead, she’s got herself to an island, the Pacific is loaded with islands. Amelia changed her plans and secluded herself. People do such things: Goldie did such a thing. But does Amelia know about the war? Which is no better-looking in the Pacific than it is in Europe.
Jo’s insomnia is back, maybe because of the war and the way it unnerves her father, the risks of Irving’s service; or maybe because in California, Goldie’s risen from the dead. Celia sleeps—even knowing about Goldie, Celia sleeps beautifully. But Jo cannot, she paces and frets; after the first shock came relief, and even gratitude, but they have given way to more angry shock. When the sky opens up like this, it’s better to be outside, the cold air a clearing. For a brief time nothing’s in your way; for that moment, imagine flight.
Jo arrives at the store half-frozen at eight, long before opening. And Eli Abramowitz is waiting outside, thick-bodied in his overcoat, hat pulled down low over his ears, work gloves covering his hands. Deep brown beard, brown eyes casting about. Eli the grocer. Eli who was once a quiet boy in a fifth-grade classroom, pudgy, dreaming, a boy with a secret skill for drawing birds; you’d know it only if you sat at the next desk, which Jo did. The grocer’s son, now a stocky balding grocer himself, his father a few years dead. Eli who lives with his mother and has never married, nor shown signs of wanting to marry, even during the brief period in high school when he politely escorted Delia Lefkowitz to Sunday concerts and never kissed her on the lips. Eli, the man Jo asks about potatoes. A harmless man—and most of them aren’t—a man who looks after his mother and does not frequent jewelry stores. He belongs in his market, not here on the blue cold street, waiting—isn’t he?—to choose a gift some woman will find persuasive.
“Good morning, Eli,” she says, and the cold stings her teeth. She unlocks the security gate over the door and then the door itself, and walks into a flood of heat, waving him in after her. “What can I do for you?”
“I wonder,” Eli says, “if I might speak to your father.”
“He’s at shul. He should be here by noon.”
At this Eli bows slightly and excuses himself and leaves, back out into the cold.
Which is just as well. She’s got inventory ahead, and bills to send out, and for one hour she will gather herself. Her father is always at temple now, all his fury and fear poured into prayer. And the radio is going night and day, and during the news broadcast’s mention of Hitler, her father’s hands will palpitate with anger, and he has to stop work until they calm themselves. But in other moments the rage abates, and he is not unkind to Jo; though he insists she wear skirt suits and visit the beauty shop, he talks to her. They have things to talk about now: the keeping of the store, the pricing of bracelets, the likelihood that Mr. Friedman will buy a sapphire for his wife, the terrible behavior of competitors. True, she isn’t Irving, with Irving’s good looks and smooth charm, but precisely so: she isn’t Irving. Now the paperwork is prompt and accurate, free of discrepancies, the cash balance exact. Her father lets her work on the books, trusts her not to pilfer, and in rare moments now he calls her Jo Jo or Josephina, endearments from her childhood. There’s a small but palpable comfort in being at the store with him, though when he is out for too long and business is off, the emptiness unnerves her. Once or twice a day, there’s a moment when the store seems like the molted skin of an animal, abandoned and frail, a hairsbreadth from disintegrating in the January wind.
All fine here, Goldie wrote. It’s a sentence Jo could not write, but now knowing of this sentence, Jo feels clammy and unwashed, her body itself a kind of squalor. Alive and all fine here, the here that should have been Jo’s, and Goldie, snatching it, sealed Jo’s fate, apparently without regret. It’s true, if she had said good-bye, Jo would have demanded she stay, but that excuses nothing. There was a hidden doorway, and Goldie found it first, walked through and shut the door, leaving Jo behind with the specter of another death. And no other doorways have appeared to Jo. All fine here. It’s likely Goldie has always been fine, has never felt a moment of not-fineness: all fine for thirteen years. All fine though each year for Jo the moodiness of birthdays descends, including Goldie’s, on which the sky always seems threatening, whether or not a storm is due. Goldie’s birthday, the day that seems more somber and strange than any other; the day when you do not want to go anywhere, when you want to huddle in the house and seal the doors tight, as if a bad wind might carry you off. On Goldie’s birthday this is what Jo and Celia in silent accord do. It is not deliberate. The day is washed out, every December 5 a day of paralysis Jo does not remember until the next December, but today, in January, each one seems perfectly clear to her laid end to end, a string of onyx beads. Days stolen—some apparently by Irving—just as the earlier shocked months were stolen, and all the time she’s stood in for Goldie: time Jo deserves to have back.
Goldie betrayed her. Irving betrayed her (though it’s true he has no will, Goldie could have roped him into it). All fine but not here, not today: blue skies but increasing wind the newspaper calls lashing. The store by eleven o’clock seems an abandoned outpost, the clamminess all through her now. And there is no remedy but to call Sadie, just to hear Sadie pick up the phone and speak to Jo from a house, with her arrogant belief in the solidity of the world. “Heard anything?” Jo says.
“Jo. Good morning.” Sadie confirms that she has heard nothing from Goldie, and asks what it is that Jo needs just now. And for the moment the wind seems an ordinary wind, the store perfectly itself.
Just after noon, her father arrives, melancholy, immaculate, and turns on the radio news. “Shame,” he says, but he is not speaking to her, he is speaking to the broadcaster. “A quiet morning, Jo?” he says, returning to the room. He smoothes his jacket sleeves and checks his pocket watch.
“A few customers.” She shows him the receipts. He tells her to take a break if she’d like, have something to eat, though he’s the one who looks exhausted. It takes effort not to ask him about Goldie: Sadie tried but got nowhere, and just look at him, how thin and papery he is. You have to be careful.
At one o’clock Eli Abramowitz returns, asking again for her father, who is at his bench. Eli waits silently, gazing at the display cases the way he used to stare out the windows at school. She pictures birds perched on top of math problems, flying through his notebook margins. “How’s your mother, Eli?” she says.
“She’s well, thank you.”
“I’m glad.”
“Yeah, she’s well.”
“Can I get you anything?”
“No. Thanks, no. I’ll just wait for Mr. Cohen.”
“He won’t be long.”
“That’s fine.”
Her father emerges, his melancholy more hidden. “Eli, hello. How are you?” he says. “Come talk with me. How is your mother?” He ushers Eli into the back office and closes the d
oor. She can hear murmurs, but two older ladies come into the store, one in a fur-trimmed coat and lipstick the color of day-old meat, the other in deep gray wool, trailing a chokingly sweet perfume. They want to look at pearl sets.
There is the sound of a door opening and closing, a second, heavier door—the back—echoing.
“Of course.” Jo leads the ladies to the center display case. “What would you like to see?”
The perfumed lady points to a short string, luminous white. “Just how much are those?”
Jo unlocks the case and leans down to check the tag, and her father appears at the counter beside her, telling the woman, “You have a good eye. Those on the right, they are very fine, I was lucky to get them in New York.” And Jo excuses herself and recedes to the counter space near the register, while her father talks to the women about pearls and how to choose the best ones, how elegantly they fall, beautiful with simple things. He shows them four necklace and earring sets, and you can see the women warm up to him, simple and elegant was exactly what they were thinking, the lipstick lady’s daughter is engaged. Still young you understand, this is a gift.
“Ah. A gift from a mother to a daughter.” He nods slightly while he looks the mother in the eye, smiles. Then gives them time to consider, busying himself with a nearby display. Jo absents herself altogether, hovering in the short back hall. Sometimes it’s better when she isn’t visible, the very fact of her dampening customers’ enthusiasm, as if they sense her clamminess and squalor. Her father does not say this directly, but when he’s there he always shows the higher-priced pieces. It takes only a few more minutes for him to make the sale. Then there’s a brief flurry of customers, men on lunch break looking for watches and small gifts for their girlfriends and wives, before the store quiets.
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