Leaving Brooklyn

by Lynne Sharon Schwartz

  “Where does he live?”

  “What is this where-they-live business, Audrey?” Lou Zelevansky poked me in the shoulder. “What are you, working for the FBI or something?”

  “Sorry. I was just curious.”

  “That’s all right,” said Belle. “I don’t mind. They live not far from here, as a matter of fact. On Union near Nostrand. But if things don’t get better they’ll have to move in with Carol’s piano teacher. She has a two-family house. She’ll just have to ask the tenants to move.”

  Nostrand. One of the stations on my subway ride from the eye doctor’s. Only two away from ours, Utica. I had passed it twice this afternoon while I was supposedly studying with Arlene, an afternoon that felt very distant. Here was reality—these many victims, the clash of ideologies, politics somersaulting personal destinies. Movietone News in the making, previewed around our dining room table.

  “This could never have happened under Roosevelt,” said my mother.

  “Oh, you and your Roosevelt,” my father grumbled. “That is a moronic remark for two reasons. First of all under Roosevelt they were our allies. We needed them to fight the war. So of course it couldn’t have happened. Second of all, do you realize he knew all about the camps? They all knew, Churchill, de Gaulle. It was no secret. They just didn’t care enough to do anything, that’s all.”

  “I can’t believe that,” said my mother. “Where did you hear that?”

  “It’s true,” said Mrs. Ribowitz. “Things are coming out. You read bits and pieces in magazines and put it together. We could have taken refugees in the beginning but we didn’t.”

  “You see?” sneered my father, with a nod of esteem for the intellectual. “Millions of people rotted away and your Roosevelt didn’t lift a finger till it was too late, and even then he waited till he couldn’t help himself.”

  “First of all he’s not my Roosevelt, and second of all we don’t have to discuss these things while we’re eating.”

  “I ’m through eating,” said my father, pushing his plate away. “Is there any more coffee?”

  My mother fetched the coffee pot and poured seconds while they all argued about Roosevelt.

  “Well, whatever you say, I frankly find that very hard to believe,” she said. “I would have to read that with my own eyes. Do you know, I was so upset the day he died I almost started a fire in the oven.”

  “You didn’t almost start it,” corrected my father. “You started it. It almost spread when you got the bright idea of pouring water over it.”

  “All right, pardon me. The fact remains. That’s how I felt.”

  “I never thought he was the saint he was cracked up to be,” said Mr. Capaleggio. “I always had my suspicions.”

  “Oh, you’re a fine one to talk,” said my father. “Your Duce didn’t exactly help matters, did he?”

  “How dare you talk to him like that!” said Mrs. Cappy, half rising out of her chair. “He was born right here in Brooklyn. He’s as much an American as you are, if not more. He’s never even crossed the ocean. And both his younger brothers fought in the war, and Vincent came home with his foot blown off and a Purple Heart.”

  “Yeah, take it easy, fella,” said Lou Zelevansky to my father. “You’re way out of line there. Calm down and drink your coffee.”

  Mr. Cappy just puffed on his pipe. “Leave him alone. I know what he’s like. He doesn’t mean it.”

  “Okay. Okay. I spoke out of turn. No harm done, all right?”

  I was stunned. My father, apologizing man-to-man. I wouldn’t have thought him capable of it.

  “But I ’ll tell you one thing,” he continued, his voice low but still itching. “It is your Pope. That is the case, isn’t it? And you can’t tell me he didn’t look the other way for years.”

  “He’s not my personal Pope. He’s the Pope, that’s all. What do you expect me to do about it? Challenge the Vatican? Start a vendetta on behalf of my Jewish friends?”

  “Don’t you think we should change the subject?” said Mr. Tessler, who so seldom spoke that his damp throaty voice was always a surprise. “I ’m sure we could find a more congenial topic.”

  “That’s an excellent idea, Nat. In a minute you can all tell me what you think of my apple pie.”

  This was my cue to leave. I could not bear a congenial topic after discovering there was life in Brooklyn. Passion. Conflict. Thought. An ample scene for both my eyes. But only under cover of darkness, with the children safely unconscious.

  “Excuse me, I’m going up to bed. This has been extremely interesting.”

  “Yes, you really got an earful tonight, didn’t you, Audrey?” said Lou Zelevansky, giving me one more avuncular poke, in the ribs.

  “Oh, cut it out, Lou,” I said. “I’ll be black and blue in the morning.”

  My mother gasped and her mouth stayed open to reprimand me, but she thought better of it. “Don’t you want to wait for dessert?”

  “No thanks, I’ve had enough. Good night. Good seeing you all.” I started for the stairs.

  “Did you hear the one about Sister Kenny and FDR?” said Lou. “Sister Kenny was helping him into the pool one day when—”

  “Could you hold it just a minute?” my mother interrupted, and there was a heavy silence.

  When I reached the top of the stairs I called down, “It’s okay, I’m not listening.” I shut the door of my room. A moment later I heard a burst of collective laughter.

  WITH THE MONEY the eye doctor gave me I took the class in Scene Study. The passage I brought in the first day was from A Streetcar Named Desire. I was Blanche DuBois, welcoming the adolescent newsboy into her sister ’s living room. The acting teacher, the same spindly teacher, recruited a boy to play opposite me. He hadn’t very much to do in the scene, merely light Blanche’s imaginary cigarette and receive her attentions, though who can tell what fertile residue these left in his life—he is only an incidental character and one needn’t worry about him. “‘Young man,’” I said. “‘Young, young, young man. Has anyone ever told you that you look like a young Prince out of the Arabian Nights?’” I crooned in a sultry voice, and as he stood in agonies of awkwardness I reached out to stroke not his cheek but the air a half inch from it, which I thought was a brilliant touch. The air near his cheek was unusually warm, and his eyes looked terrified, yet at the same time ever so faintly amused. The next lines called for me to kiss him, but I didn’t. “’ Now run along, now, quickly! It would be nice to keep you, but I’ve got to be good—and keep my hands off children.’” The class was awestruck.

  IT WAS NEVER again as it had been with the eye doctor. I was right, at fifteen, when I foresaw that. Not only because he was the first; not only because he was… he was… Oh, yes, because he was the first, and himself, he was something that flies off the page every time I capture a word to define it. But also because never again could there be that particular set of voluptuous, atavistic, outrageous, and above all delicate circumstances.

  I left Brooklyn. I leave still, every moment. For no matter how much I leave, it doesn’t leave me.

  I didn’t become an actress in the end, but instead this I who makes up stories. In this story, I can’t help wondering if I have succumbed to the temptation of any maker of a memoir—to present it more dramatically, improve the events so that they yield a more precious truth.

  How completely and

  how deeply faithless we are,

  writes the poet Marina Tsvetayeva,which is

  to say: how true we are to ourselves.

  Perhaps I haven’t succeeded in finding the girl I was, but only in fabricating the girl I might have been, would have liked to be, looking backwards from the woman I have become. For now I could do easily all that she did with such effort, though now it couldn’t happen. The very notion is an Escher construction: I am not a sheltered child but a grownup version of a child who never was. And maybe I am this way because she never was, couldn’t be. And yet it feels so real. If it wasn’t a memory to begin
with, it has become one now.

  Does being true to one’s self mean offering the literal truth or the truth that should have been, the truth of the image of one’s self? It hardly matters by this time. By this time the border between seeing straight on and seeing round the corners of solid objects, between the world as smooth and coherent and the world as dissociated skinless particles, is thoroughly blurred. No longer a case of double vision, but of two separate eyes whose separate visions—what happened and what might have happened—come together in what we call the past, which we see with hindsight.

  Memory is revision. I have just destroyed another piece of my past, to tell a story.

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