“John’s covering for me,” he said. He was peering over her shoulder. With a few black and gray lines she had captured pendant blossoms. He said, “I never realized you were so good. Aren’t you going to finish?”
She shook her head.
“Beverly. Don’t!”
But already she was ripping, crushing the sheet in one hand. “It’s rotten, rotten,” she said, dropping the ball of paper.
He sat on the grass, raising long, skinny legs to bridge fallen lavender blooms. “You weren’t thinking of good or rotten before I came.”
“I wasn’t thinking, period.”
“Then?”
“I was working. Lloyd, could you do a calculus problem if I were in your room?”
He flushed. “Now,” he said, “we get down to the basic differences.”
“Girls feel the same,” she said. “Or haven’t you noticed?”
They both reddened. A robin landed nearby, poking his yellow beak in mud surrounding the leaky sprinkler head.
“It’s nice and cool here,” Lloyd said.
“I love summer.”
“Why?”
“Oh, I have time to draw. And I’m not forced into the ominous world of people.”
“About du Pont,” he said. “You wouldn’t want to live anywhere but Los Angeles, would you?”
And reached for her hand, the one clenched around charcoal. Now. Lloyd might have stretched his body along the length of hers, open mouth to open mouth, he might have kissed her small breasts which were astonishingly white and shaped like peaches, but this, taking her hand, was on another plane. At that time a boy and girl didn’t hold hands, not if mothers were likely to see from a window, not unless the couple were engaged—or at the very least, pinned. Beverly and Lloyd, both, had been raised to this fine distinction. She jerked back her hand. Lloyd’s face glowed with naked hurt. And the world of lavender blossoms and fernlike leaves rushed around Beverly. She never had taken pleasure in conquests. She could not, like Caroline, inflict the teasing ambiguities of flirtation. She could not bear the thought of causing minor humiliation in anyone, much less Lloyd. He gave a muted, nervous cough. Here, Caroline would have laughed and made rapport. Beverly could not trust herself to speak. Charcoal snapped in her fist.
After a while Lloyd spoke. “See the way the sun comes through the branches?”
“I was trying to get that on paper.”
“When I was little,” he said, “there was this stained-glass window in church. All colors of pink and red, and sometimes the light would slant like this. I figured it was a ramp to Jesus and his angels.”
Beverly could scarcely breathe.
Next Wednesday morning, early, she drove to USC, filling out her next semester’s schedule. Afterward, she didn’t get back in Mrs. Linde’s Hudson. She walked north, past the statue of Tommy Trojan on his horse. Hot already, waves shimmered off the streets around campus. After a while she came to a large Catholic church. St. Mary’s. Covering her soft brown hair with a scarf that she didn’t tie—it was too hot—she entered. The church was empty, smelled of incense, wax, and peace. Knotting the silk, she sank into the last pew. An old Mexican woman limped in, pausing to genuflect before kneeling at the leather rail in front of the altar. Beads clicked. Sibilant whispers.
Beverly gazed up at the cross.
Lloyd, she thought, Lloyd. I’m here to think about him. In most girls it would be histrionic, coming to an alien church to contemplate a boyfriend, but Beverly had not chosen her ground with drama in mind. For all her self-consciousness about being Jewish, in every other matter she lived on the naked point of innocence. She acted instinctively, without artifice or hypocrisy or malice. She was here for one reason: the place seemed right to sort out emotions about a Catholic.
First, she thought, the necking. It’s fine. But … She was passionate, and with two of her high school boyfriends she had ached to go the limit. With Lloyd, though, she never had felt any substantial urges. We both enjoy classical music. And Lloyd, thank God, would rather take in a picture show than a beer bust. He never makes derogatory cracks about any group. (This was vitally important to Beverly, who had spent the better part of her childhood playing deaf to such cracks.) When he plays his oboe his brow gets all crinkled.
And as usual when she tried to think to a concise end, her mind wandered. Without realizing, she leaned forward, resting her arms on the next pew. The position was awkward. She inched forward, resting her weight on her knees. The same position as the Mexican woman. How strange, Beverly thought. The old woman’s praying.
“I want to pray,” she whispered.
Pray?
The Lindes didn’t belong to a temple. Ritually they celebrated Christmas with an Open House, and shared their Thanksgiving turkey with the Harleys, who were English—Thad Harley was Howard Linde’s partner in the accounting firm of Harley and Linde. Other holidays, the Jewish ones, were observed by Mr. and Mrs. Linde and Beverly, alone, gulping a festive dinner with a general air of embarrassment because Willeen, the colored daily maid, was serving them. Years later, Beverly read of the marranos, those Jews forcibly converted by the Inquisition, who lived exactly as their neighbors, yet for generations held on to one particular aspect of the faith of their fathers, sometimes merely changing body linen for Friday night or turning to a wall as death overtook them: Beverly was reminded of the manner her family had practiced Judaism, furtively eating a large meal from the good Lenox on the High Holy Days.
A lean priest rustled up the center aisle. He was looking at her curiously. Or so she imagined. All at once her mouth tasted bad, metallic, as if she’d been sucking a penny.
What am I doing in a church?
I don’t belong here.
Pushing to her feet, she fled, racing through hot streets. By the time she reached Mrs. Linde’s Hudson sweat rolled from her and she was gasping in terrible heaves.
That night she phoned Lloyd. In a breathy, embarrassed murmur, she told him she couldn’t, uhh, keep seeing him, at least not every Saturday night.
At the end of August she came down with mumps which worsened to mumps meningitis. Four long white boxes of American Beauties arrived with cards from Lloyd.
She had fully recuperated on the afternoon that Mrs. Linde came into her room with a letter. “Dear, Aunt Pauline would like for you to come to New York.” She handed Beverly the folded sheet. “How nice of her,” Beverly said. “Daddy and I think it would be good for you.” There was an unspoken corollary to Mrs. Linde’s remark: to get away from Catholic boys who send red roses. More than anything, Beverly wished she could talk out her bewilderment with her mother. It was impossible. The Lindes were oblique people. They had bought this brick house in Glendale, which was not then (and is still not) a suburb of liberalism. The particular section they had chosen had no other Jewish families, yet they had proceeded to act with their daughter as if she were no different from their neighbors. (In school, with honest cruelty, the children had made Beverly aware of these differences.) Later, the Lindes did admit one minor peculiarity, like having an extra molar. We marry only those with one too many teeth. Beverly had accepted her parents’ paradoxes. Now her eyes blurred. Weepy. She was undone by their concern. She wanted to reassure her mother that she didn’t love Lloyd. This, however, was a time and place of reticence, and Mrs. Linde—to the end of her days—considered discussion of one’s emotional landscape a breach of propriety. So Beverly said, “Thank you, Mother,” and hugged Mrs. Linde. Unyielding all-in-one corset. “You’re such a funny, sensitive child,” Mrs. Linde said, extricating herself. “We decided since you can’t be in school this semester, it’s a perfect opportunity for you to see New York.”
2
“My father,” Dan said, “thinks I’m getting too involved.”
New York. Beverly had been taken by Dan Grossblatt for Sunday brunch at Steinberg’s and Dan had ordered for both of them. Lox, cream cheese, and bagels. Cream cheese, of course, she knew. Lox she recognized as smoked
salmon, but she’d never been exposed to a bagel. When she’d asked what it was, Dan, laughing, had assumed she was putting him on. Now, biting into the tough bun, she stared at him. Cream cheese squished out with a bit of salmon. She bent to let them fall, unobtrusively as possible, onto her plate.
Finishing chewing, she asked, “Involved?”
He reached for her pickled tomato. “If you didn’t want it, why order?”
“You ordered.”
They smiled at one another. A bald waiter passed, his tray leaking odors of rich brown butter.
“How’d he know you are? Involved?” Asking, she realized her stupidity. Dan lived at home, someplace in New Rochelle, and since they’d met sixteen days earlier, he’d taken her out every night.
“You had to start the phoning.” Dan grinned. He was the one who called. Two or three times a day, at odd hours. Friday morning, though, at the Museum of Modern Art she’d been transfixed, overwhelmed by Monet’s Waterlilies and knowing she must share with him, had called his father’s factory in Brooklyn, S&G Shoes. Dan worked there.
“Did he say anything else?”
“Sure.”
She tilted her head questioningly.
“He’s got a girl for me to meet. She’s loaded. A shadchan found—”
“A shad—a what?”
“A marriage broker.”
Slowly she wiped fishy cream cheese from her fingers, gazing at him. Voices and blue coils of smoke rose from the next table. Dan went to services Saturday mornings, ate no shellfish or any part of a pig, never creamed his coffee after a meat meal: this, without really thinking it through, she had accepted. Dan was religious. Lloyd confessed and got up early for Mass, the Wynans went every Sunday morning to St. Mark’s. Dan did these things. A marriage broker? She kept staring into almond-shaped blue eyes set above broad Slavic cheekbones. This was Dan Grossblatt. Her Dan. Twenty-six. When he stood he would be the same height as she in Cuban heels. (He was so full of vitality that she never felt too tall.) He was warm. He was generous—but got pretty brutal if she mentioned it. As a kid he had listened to “The Happiness Boys,” Billy Jones and Ernie Hare, had known Ming of Mongo and the Katzenjammers and Tom Swift, had half-backed his high school football team, had graduated from the University of Michigan, had been mustered out a captain in the Army, he was hot for the King Cole Trio, he laughed at Bob Hope and Red Skelton, one after the other, on Sunday nights. Dan was, God knows, more all-American than Lloyd with his slide rule and Bach. Yet here he was, Dan, talking matter-of-factly about something from another world, another age. A marriage broker?
“That’s some expression,” he said.
“I didn’t know there were those people. Not anymore. Why? What does your father want?”
“A rich girl for me.”
“She’s probably a dog,” Beverly said. “Is she?”
“What? Loaded?”
“Pretty?”
“Like Lana Turner, he heard, and what’s so hot about that? I told him to forget it.” Dan traced the threadlike scar under her lip and she kissed his finger with a tiny, popping sound.
“Buzz,” he said quietly. “You’re right. I’m no Jack Armstrong.”
Beverly, although sensitive to people’s pain, was fairly dense about their other emotions. But she understood Dan. He understood her. They were crazy in love, but that wasn’t why they understood one another. Dan never hid his feelings from her. His warmth, she realized, drew her out. Also he was shrewd about people. Often—like now—he could tell her what she was thinking.
When they left Steinberg’s a soft rain fell. “Come on,” Dan said, taking her hand, starting to run. Sodden leaves mushed under the boots she’d chosen at Saks. In the park were swings that waited for children who didn’t play in the rain. Dan gripped a metal chain. “Here,” he said. “Dan, I never can get myself started.” “So I’ll push you.” And he did, shouting, “Pump!” each time. Beverly, laughing, kicking her new boots on the upswing, tucking them under as she went back. “Enough, Dan,” she called, “I’m on my own steam.” But he kept shoving his palms on her back until she semicircled as high as possible. He sat on the next swing. Bare twigs pendulous with water raced at her. Every breath delighted. Already Dan was high as she. Rain matted his thick brown hair and he looked, as always, packed with energy. He started to laugh. She laughed, too. “Oh Dan. Dan, Dan, Dan.”
That was the night he told her.
They were outside Aunt Pauline’s building in his new Packard convertible, a welcome-home gift from his father, bought, Dan had told her, with an exorbitant bonus.
He had been at the liberation of Buchenwald.
Words came at her. She couldn’t duck. Limepit mass graves. Shower rooms with shower heads that held poison gas. Ovens. SS injection experiments. Skeleton corpses by the thousands, cadaverous survivors unable to eat, survivors dying in the hour of their liberation. Before that night he hadn’t mentioned it. (She had, of course, read disquieting snips in newspapers.)
“It was raining, and my uniform was soaked. Whenever I smell wet wool I smell … Oh God! Those other smells.” He shuddered, gripping the wheel. “And the faces—when people starve, they look alike, know that? The identical face. A skull with huge, caved eyes. And the corpses were yellow and flat, stacked neatly as lumber in a sawmill. Men, women, children—there weren’t many children. Know what hell is? A huge, muddy place with living corpses and dead lumber.”
She was shivering. He gazed at the streetlight, as if there were some answer to be found in electricity. And told her about the Frenchman. Somehow the one Frenchman’s tale reached deeper into her than all the number-tattooed victims of Buchenwald. Dan had found him on a road south of Paris, walking erratically beneath dripping plane trees. Dan had stopped the jeep to give him a lift. The Frenchman’s soaking coat (courtesy of the US Army) was open and so was his striped slave jacket.
“I don’t know how he got that far, Buzz. He was so thin I could see his heart beating. Like a fist opening and closing.” Dan clenched and unclenched his hand. “But he kept telling me he was fine. Very strong. After a while I figured it. They ran a selection. Workers in this line live. All others in that line. To die. Either/or. He’d been in a world where his only right to exist was his being able to work. He spoke pretty good English. He told me he was on his way home. He was from Lyons. His wife and kids, he said, should be there. He’d been separated from them at Drancy—that was the camp depot for France. They’d agreed after they would get back to Lyons as soon as possible. He said it over and over, they would be in Lyons, soon he’d see them. Yvonne, that was his wife. And Jacques, his son, and little Marie. Buzz, I can still hear the way he said the name. P’teet M’ree. Very soft, like that. And all the time I could see his heart. We talked about New York. In ’thirty-eight he was here, a business trip. He was a lawyer.”
High heels clattered on the sidewalk, fading. Lonely.
“We were talking about the Statue of Liberty one minute. Then he was dead. Just like that.” Dan was silent again. Finally he shrugged. “I got together nine other Jewish guys and we said kaddish.”
Said what? Did it matter? Always Beverly had sensed a flaw of horror under everyday surfaces, and now she was inundated with the evidence.
“That’s why I keep things,” Dan said. “If I forget thee, O Jerusalem.” He paused.
“Go on.”
“I’m willing to go through the whole schmear because I believe in God. And it’s my way of remembering.”
“Ritual is a form of remem—”
Her mouth froze. In dim shadows cast by the streetlight, she saw his face. Violent. Furious. He gripped her shoulder, hurting.
“You don’t know what the shit you’re talking about!”
“Catholics don’t eat meat Fridays because—”
“Catholics! The lawyer told me his wife was a devout Catholic! Of Jewish extraction. Did I say I went to Lyons to find her?”
Beverly shook her head.
“The
last anyone knew of her was Buchenwald. Maybe I did find her. She could’ve been one of those corpses—no! Hell, how could she’ve lasted that long?” Dan’s fingers cut harder into her flesh. “All those stacked bodies had one common denominator. Whether they called themselves Catholic, Lutheran, atheist, agnostic, they were Jews. Jews. The great assimilated along with the Hasidim. My father’s family in Lodz. All Jews.” Dan released her shoulder. She didn’t permit herself to move. “Nothing to do with religion.” Dan’s normally ebullient voice was levelly cold. “That Frenchwoman. You. Me. They wanted to rid the earth of us.”
She felt his words more than heard them.
She became part of the vast, festering wound of their generation of Jews. The survivors who asked: Why not me? If the others, then why not someday me? She was, and would forever be, haunted by the skeletal wraiths. Her heart never could make the necessary adjustment. Never. Yet at that second she was mostly terrified by Dan’s fury. She reacted in her own way. She withdrew. Shifting on new leather as far as possible from him, she said, “You don’t need anything to make you remember.”
“So?”
“Then it’s not the point. Giving up cigars on Saturday and wearing a cap to pray, I can’t understand why you won’t admit it’s ritual.” Her voice came out too thin.
“You’re a damn stupid broad,” he said, adding with careful viciousness. “What’s the point of you?”
Tears came. She leaned her head against the icy window, ashamed her weakness could be seen by Dan, who must know her muffled sobs were only in small part for the tortured millions, the French lawyer and his family. She wept for herself. She wept like a prisoner thrust back into solitary confinement. She felt a handkerchief pushed into her hand. She blew her nose into smells of freshly ironed linen and tobacco, fine and happy odors of the living: she reached blindly. Dan’s large, warm hand clasped hers. She slid across the seat. He buried his face in her neck.
“Who says you can’t smell in your dreams?” His face was wet, too.
She stroked his hair, which was crisp and coarse. Many people are able to deny evil. Beverly couldn’t. Evil is. Her mind wasn’t neat, analytical, small. What Dan had told her she could never explain away in philosophical or psychological terms. Evil is. She held him, stroking his coarse brown hair.
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