Shining Through

by Susan Isaacs

  “Linda.” I jumped, even though John’s voice was so soft it barely made a sound. My imagination had been sneaking around, following Mr. Leland to Denmark.

  “Yes?”

  “It’s getting late. Let’s move on.”

  “Move on?” I repeated, not quite daring to get what he meant.

  He didn’t explain. One hand signaled the waiter for a check. The other hand moved under the table. Hidden by the cloth, it showed me specifically what he had in mind.

  8

  All those nights I had been working—legitimately working—I had never really given a second thought to my mother. Sure, we weren’t having dinner together anymore, but all dinner was for her was pushing a hamburger around her plate, giving it exercise; I ate, we talked.

  So when my nights with John began, when I began coming home at what my Grandma Olga would have called a disgraceful hour, I didn’t think it could make any difference. Work didn’t end until eight or nine at night, and then we went to his apartment, and then…so what if I was getting home in the hour before dawn? My mother wouldn’t know. She never toddled in before daylight. How could she possibly miss me? Ten o’clock, midnight or four-thirty: it was all the same to her.

  And even if she had known, I wouldn’t hear any motherly shrieks of dismay. She’d squeeze my hand, kiss me, encourage me: Linda, sweetie, stay overnight! Buy yourself a black brassiere and it’ll pay off—in spades! He’ll be taking you to a furrier by August!

  But then one Saturday afternoon, I glanced at my mother and actually felt that shiver of recognition they write about in serious Saturday Evening Post short stories. My mother had become a sick old lady.

  Not that she acted it. “Baby doll,” she cooed, as we walked past the German bakery on Metropolitan Avenue, with its basket of shellacked pumpernickels. We were walking arm-in-arm, like fifteen-year-old best friends. “I can’t stand the suspense anymore. So he gave you dinner, right?” I nodded, and then—fast—managed to grab her around the waist, just in time to keep her from falling. There hadn’t been a curb or a stray pebble; for the third time that day, she’d stumbled over nothing. “Okay, dinner, which is very nice, especially with the wine. I mean, it’s a real gent who orders wine. The small fries with a couple of bucks in their pocket are always shoutin’, ‘Waiter, champagne.’ Not Johnny…What’s his last name?” A car backfired.

  “Berringer.”

  “Oh, yeah, right. You know, I like B names. Anyway, Linda, lamb, what I want to ask you is this….”

  She looked me right in the eye. The whites around her huge, gentle brown eyes were a dull yellow and shot through with red veins.

  Despite her white summer dress, scoop-necked, sleeveless, splotched with its pattern of pink and purple daisies, there was nothing even remotely young about my mother anymore. Her skin had turned from luminous to waxy; it was sickness, not just a drunk’s pallor. It was such an awful shock.

  Of course, she didn’t notice how I felt. She just babbled on. “Did Johnny give you anything else?”

  “Like a present?”

  “Linda, you know what I mean, and I do not mean a box of chocolate creams. Did he…did you do it?”

  My mother’s voice was not exactly well-modulated, and we were just passing Hugo’s Dry Cleaners, where there was actually a line outside; half the neighborhood were bringing in their wool coats and blankets. “Shhh!” I hissed. Ridgewood was mainly German, plus a little Irish, a little Polish. It liked a few steins at the beer garden, potluck suppers at church, and well-swept front stoops. It did not like public discussions about doing it.

  “Don’t ‘shhh’ me. I wasn’t talking that loud,” she whispered. Some whisper: more like foghorn on an empty ocean.

  Just then, a middle-aged couple with matching gray hair, carrying their itchy winter coats, passed by on their way to Hugo’s. My mother ignored the woman, but wiggled her fingers—a cute little “hi” gesture—and then winked at the man. Some wink. It was like she was an act at the Palace and wanted to make sure some guy in the last row, balcony, didn’t miss it. Well, no one missed it. The man went absolutely white but kept walking. His wife whined through her nose, “Walter, who is that? Walter.”

  I pulled her along. “Walter?” I demanded.

  “Gee, I thought his name was Arthur,” my mother said vaguely.

  “Who is he?”

  “He hangs out at Fritz’s.”

  “What does he do?”

  “He could drink you and me under the table. Now listen, sweetie, you and Johnny. Are you and him making beautiful music together? Oh, don’t give me a sour puss. It’s not such a terrible question.”

  “I know, Mom.”

  “That’s not an answer.” She wasn’t that dumb a blonde.

  It wasn’t an answer, and why not give her one? She wouldn’t be shocked by anything I could admit to. A woman who could not remember the name of a man she’d had sex with but could probably describe the color and texture of the upholstery of his Chevrolet—that was not a woman who would gasp at the thought of her thirty-one-year-old daughter lying on top of clean sheets underneath a lawyer between Park and Lexington avenues.

  “We’re getting along fine, Mom.”

  “Tell me exactly what he looks like.”

  All her attention was a little overwhelming. In my whole life, she had never shown so much interest before; but then, I’d never done anything so interesting. But here we were, a thirty-one-year-old legal secretary with pinned-back hair and sensible shoes, and a forty-seven-year-old drunk with brown age spots dotting her temples, gossiping about guys.

  “He has blond hair, light, like ours, but not as full. You know, it’s the kind that flops when he walks fast. And he has dark blue eyes. His nose is regular, but—”

  “You already told me about his face. Come on, move south.” I was blushing, not believing we were having this conversation walking past Steiner’s Hardware with its window full of drill bits. “Tell me what he’s like downtown.”

  “Well…” I paused for a second. “Mom, he’s wonderful.”

  “No kidding! Oh, Lin, baby, that’s terrific!” She reached out to put her arm around me and, with her left foot, stepped on the edge of the insole of her right sandal and tripped herself. I caught her as her knees buckled; we both pretended it hadn’t happened. “Is Johnny”—she gave me a girl-to-girl smile, happy, delighted for me—“fun?”

  “Well, you know, he’s quiet. We don’t talk all that much.”

  “The quiet ones surprise you.” She raised her voice over the honks of cars and the rattle of trucks. “All those words they don’t say go straight you-know-where, if you get my drift. Am I right or am I right?” she demanded.

  “You’re right.”

  “So?” she said, as the light turned green and we crossed the street. “What do I gotta do? Get down on my hands and knees and beg you to talk?”

  “After work, I’ve been going to his place.”

  “And? Come on! Be fun!” I didn’t know what to tell her: Hey, it’s just great, Mom. We’re having a swell time. Or the truth: Mom, you wouldn’t believe what it’s like with us. We can’t wait for it, working all day, acting normal, being polite, and then finally, when we get to his apartment, almost tearing at each other. But all those in-between times, between the desk and the bed—good manners, a polite smile or two and…nothing.

  “And,” I finally answered, “I can’t believe it’s actually happening to me.”

  “You’re in love, sweetpea?”

  “Yes.”

  “And him?” Just then, she stumbled again, but before I could reach for her, she recovered on her own. “It’s nothing. Damn ankle straps.”

  I tried to be gentle with her. “You know, you’re looking a tiny bit pale—”

  “Lay off! I ran outta rouge.” She shut me up in a voice I hardly ever heard—hard, hoarse: the voice of a tough old broad.

  I wasn’t going to be shut up. “Mom, please. Have you been feeling okay?”

&nb
sp; She changed back to her cutesy voice. “It depends on who’s doing the feelin’.”

  “Have you been eating?”

  “Sure. The olive in the martini. My green vegetable.” Her oldest joke. “Now stop changing the subject. How does Big John feel about Little Linda? Huh?”

  “I think…” It wasn’t just that she’d aged. Every trace of her beauty was gone. You looked at her sallow, sunken face and scrawny arms and legs, and if you hadn’t known, you would never have realized Betty Voss had once been the ultimately desirable female, a soft-mouthed, hazy beauty with a halo of white-blond hair and huge, liquid eyes. You’d think she’d been a sad little wallflower who’d grown up into a pathetic, drab drunk.

  “Don’t be shy about telling me about Johnny, lovie. I know the score when it comes to guys and gals.” She smiled. “He’s nuts for you, isn’t he?”

  “Yeah, Mom.” I said. “He is. Absolutely nuts. He can’t do enough for me.”

  “Linda, it’s about time you’re getting what you deserve!”

  Almost every girl in the office had some sort of outside interest. Gladys’s, naturally, was Lives of Important Lawyers; her eyes took in the society page with such intensity it was a miracle the paper did not ignite. Lenny Stevenson was such a Giants fan that she actually lived in a rooming house eight blocks from the Polo Grounds. Wilma Gerhardt loved clothes (expensive clothes), and Marian Mulligan probably had every color nail polish ever produced during the entire history of Hazel Bishop—including Ripe Plum, a red so close to purple that her boss, Mr. Wilson, asked her please not to wear it to the office anymore. (She took that as a compliment, deciding that her nail polish was too wildly exciting for a place of business; she claimed that when she wore it on weekends, she was besieged by passionate glances and had even had a couple of offers.)

  So my particular outside interest, the war, was probably considered eccentric, but it was accepted. I bought the News each morning, but as the situation in Europe got hotter, so did my desire to know. By the end of the afternoon there would be a pile of Suns, Journal-Americans, Posts, Tribunes, Mirrors, World-Telegrams, and Timeses, all donated by the girls themselves or recovered from the bosses’ wastebaskets.

  The girls could no more understand my need to read every version, every interpretation of what was going on than I could comprehend why anyone with half a brain could work herself up over Ripe Plum or the Giants, but they were willing enough to help me with my hobby, as long as I didn’t bore them by talking about it. Oh, sure, they’d join in a fast discussion of the Dunkirk evacuation, like, Gee, all those little boats were really something. But if I did anything like ask, Was Dunkirk inevitable? all I’d get would be a couple of shrugs, a sigh, and then Gladys pointedly clearing her throat and demanding if anyone had heard that Mr. Nugent was keeping company with a girl in New Jersey whose family raised something—either cranberries or chihuahuas.

  One afternoon, after John and I had been together (I don’t know what else to call it) for nearly three weeks, he glanced down at the stack of newspapers on my desk and asked, “How come you save all those papers?”

  “I read them,” I said.

  “Oh,” he said. “Good.” Then he smiled in his most automatic way and wandered back into his office. I wondered whether he realized how interested I was in what was happening in the world or whether he just assumed I liked to clip recipes for Ground Lamb Supreme.

  By that time he’d learned I could cook. After our first endless, awful restaurant dinner, we’d given up on going out to eat. But because we worked so late, we had to come up with something; it’s hard to sit in a taxicab gazing hungrily at each other while your stomachs make grumbling noises.

  So the fourth or fifth time, John asked, “Can you cook?”

  “Well, nothing fancy, but I’m pretty good, especially with German dishes. My grandmother taught me to cook, and she was terrific. Did you ever try Gefüllter Krautkopf?” He shook his head, and it was pretty obvious he could live a rich, full life without ever trying my Gefüllter Krautkopf.

  But the following Monday when we arrived at his apartment, I opened the refrigerator and instead of finding the slab of cheese and bottle of milk that we’d been grabbing, there were four lamb chops (four! lamb chops!), some potatoes and carrots.

  “If you feel like cooking…” John said.

  I practically leapt into the refrigerator at the chance to try something else to please him. I clattered about while he wandered into the living room to go through the briefcase he’d brought home with him.

  I sliced perfect, tiny carrot circles. I boiled the potatoes and mashed them till they were absolutely lumpless. (I had to do it with a fork. Either Nan wasn’t much in the potato department, or she had gotten the masher as part of her divorce settlement.) And the meat! I hadn’t had a lamb chop since 1929, before the Depression. I broiled them. They were perfect.

  And so every night when we got to his apartment, I cooked, he worked. We ate. And then…Dinner itself was the only real problem. When it came to the bedroom, real life with John was far better than my dreams. But the long conversations I’d imagined—with John guiding me into a deeper and richer understanding of the world, of Europe at war—still remained dreams. Give it time, I told myself. When it stops being so…wild, out of control, he’ll give you a chance. And in fairness to John, he had twenty partners—worldly men—he could have stimulating conversations with. He wasn’t starved for someone to talk to, the way I was.

  One night in early June, right after Dunkirk, we sat over broiled chicken and rice with absolutely nothing to say, after he’d given me a congenial “Nice rice.” It was late, after eleven, one of those nights when we’d been unable to keep away from the bedroom. After almost two hours there, I’d come out and cooked. But once off the wrinkled, sweaty sheets, he was tired and had nothing to offer me, not even an “It certainly is getting muggy,” or an “I love the way you looked in there a minute ago, standing and cooking.”

  We sat at a table—dark wood, plain white linen place mats with Nan’s white monogram, plain white dishes—in the dining room. I couldn’t stand the silence, broken only by a clock ticking. It just burst out of me: “What did you think of Churchill’s speech?”

  “What?”

  I put my voice down real low and took on an English accent. “‘…The New World, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the Old.’ Did you like what he said?”

  John looked a little taken aback, as if his chicken breast had spoken. “Churchill’s quite articulate,” he finally said. He smoothed the lapel of his beige bathrobe. It was the softest cotton, with light brown piping, so fine—and so neutral—I knew it had been a gift from Nan.

  “I know he’s articulate, but what I was talking about was, you know, the meaning of what he said.”

  His eyebrows went up a little. “The meaning?”

  “Yeah, the meaning. Don’t you think what he’s saying is that it’s inevitable that France is going to be beaten to a pulp and that all that’s going to be left is England? Well, England and America.”

  “It seems that way.” He gave me a warm smile and combed back the front of his hair with his fingers.

  “I’m not saying that it’s not a brilliant speech,” I went on: “‘We shall fight on the beaches…We shall never surrender.’ Nobody, not even FDR, speaks like him.”

  John didn’t say anything. For a minute I assumed he was being thoughtful. And then I realized: I was wearing his undershirt. The strap had fallen off my shoulder and he was staring at that. His mind, the mind everyone swore was so astute, so brilliant, so original, was not on Winston Churchill.

  But I tried again. “Come on. Listen to me for a second. What I’m wondering is, for all the good this speech is doing for English morale—and I bet it’s doing a lot of good—don’t you think it’s a terrible message to be sending the French right now? Look, no one’s saying there’s any real hope, but don’t you think—”

  John st
ood, walked over, pulled me out of the chair. He eased the strap off the other shoulder. The undershirt slid down to the floor. “Who wants to talk about politics?”

  “I do.” I looked at his beautiful intelligent face. “Hey! I have an idea. Why don’t you do something crazy, something you’ve never tried before? Talk to me for five minutes.”

  “Come on, Linda. You know I think you’re very intelligent.”

  “Then talk to me, damn it. Listen to me.”

  He started to kiss me—my eyes, my cheeks, my mouth. “You listen to me,” he whispered. “We’ll talk about politics some other time. I promise. But right now…you’re driving me out of my mind. You know that, don’t you?” He pulled me down to the bare wood floor of the dining room. “Let’s do it again. Right here.” And I was ready. More than ready. I tore at the sash of his bathrobe, wildly eager.

  Maybe my mother was right. Maybe what I was getting was what I deserved.

  9

  Snoring, my mother sounded like a huge, slow, rusty machine. That would have been half bad. What made it worse was that she talked—yelled, actually—in her sleep. “SWEETIE!” she roared, exploding the soft silence of the Sunday morning. “Sweetie!” Sometimes I thought she was dreaming about my father, but she could have been calling one of her barroom guys, whose names she could never remember.

  “Sweetie!” reverberated throughout the neighborhood. It was too hot to close the window; if I did, my mother would wake up soaked with sweat, retching. I knew that from experience. “Sweetie!” Whoever she was hollering at in her dream wasn’t giving her the time of day.

  I stretched my neck to look out the living room window from where I was sitting. Just my luck. Across the street, Buddy Knauer and his pregnant wife, Sally, who had gone to high school with me, were standing on the stoop of their two-family house, shaking their heads at my mother’s howling. They were on their way to church. Their three dimply little girls came skipping out the door in their candy pink, daffodil and powder blue dresses, looking like Easter eggs. So Buddy and Sally just tsk-tsked at another “Sweetie!” with Christian forbearance.