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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2006 by Jennifer Gilmore
All rights reserved, including the right of
reproduction in whole or in part in any form.
SCRIBNER and design are trademarks of Macmillan Library Reference USA, Inc., used under license by Simon & Schuster, the publisher of this work.
DESIGNED BY KYOKO WATANABE
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Gilmore, Jennifer.
Golden country : a novel / Jennifer Gilmore.
p. cm.
1. Jewish families—Fiction. 2. Jewish fiction. 3. Domestic fiction. I. Title
PS3607.I4525G55 2006
813’.6—dc22 2005057586
ISBN-13: 978-1-4165-4098-4
ISBN-10: 1-4165-4098-9
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For my grandparents:
Charlotte and Sidney, Maurice and Jane
He had listened from such a distance that what he saw was an outline, a caricature, and an abstraction. How different it might seem, if he had been able to see these lives from the inside, looking out.
—Delmore Schwartz, “America! America!”
Chapter 1
Irving Berlin! 1957
IT WAS JOSEPH BRODSKY, the one person who had never caused any trouble, who did not want his daughter to marry David Bloom.
“I will not have my grandchildren brought up on filthy money,” Joseph told his wife the evening after Miriam had called from New York with the news.
Married! Miriam had screamed so happily into the phone. Instantly Joseph remembered her, a girl in a yellow bathing suit on the dock by Sebago Lake, her hands on her hips. When had her bones grown into a woman’s body? He imagined her limbs elongating before his eyes as if he were watching the time-lapse film of a flower blooming, a crystal forming: his daughter growing up and away from him.
Joseph had been readying for sleep before the phone call. Now, sitting on the edge of his bed, he paused a moment before removing his shoes. Then he set upright the milk carton he had taken to putting by the bed so he wouldn’t have to get up to urinate so many times during the night. Joseph was beginning to feel the effects of age—the real effects, ones that seemed to rise up from that strange place deep within him where his faith was stored—and to refuse the marriage troubled him. He wanted to be sure his daughters were taken care of. But David Bloom? Of all the men on earth. He didn’t know the boy well, it was true, but history is history. End of story.
“What are you talking about, Joe?” Esther sat at her vanity slathering her face with cold cream.
“Mob ties.” Joseph nodded his head to emphasize the gravity of this statement. He thought of his own brother, the day he left Brooklyn for that gang of thugs and how his mother gave all of Solomon’s belongings—his comic books, shirts, his telescope with the broken lens—to Henrietta Szold. For the Hadassah, his mother had said. And that woman had sent the package back—a clean cardboard box tied tightly with twine—without so much as a note.
“How do you know for sure?” Esther asked Joseph.
“I know because I know,” he told her.
Only once had Joseph discussed Solomon, and that had been when he’d come home late from a terribly hard day on the long selling road. Frustrated by how little such a long day had yielded, Joseph walked in the door, drank three glasses of peach schnapps, told Esther the story, wept, and then tried unsuccessfully to undo his wife’s bra in the kitchen.
“And how’s that?” Esther watched in the mirror as her husband dipped his feet into his leather slippers. “For Christ’s sake, Joe. Miriam can’t be running around that city—single and loose in Manhattan—forever.”
If only from the state of her daughter’s bitten nails, Joseph knew that Esther was right. He could see that Miriam had anxieties. She’d been neurotic since she was a girl—once they’d had to drag her out of a child’s bathtub filled with chemicals. Esther had found her in a ball, coiled as tightly as a pin curl. I’m getting clean, Miriam had said when questioned as to what on earth she had been doing. But what did that mean? My little girl, Joseph had thought when he was confronted with the image of that pink, raw body. And then the image much later, of the girl in New York, a brand-new nose hidden beneath seeping bandages. Her eyes were two bruises on the moon of that blanched, frightened face. This had been the only time Joseph had questioned his wife’s intentions.
Miriam might have anxiety, but some of the Brodskys’ friends’ kids had been true problems. Ethel Cohen’s daughter was institutionalized. Drugs, they’d said. Imagine. And Arthur Friedman’s boy was a no-good drunk. No matter how Art tried, that boy was always showing up at his doorstep at all hours, inebriated. Joseph knew he had been blessed with two good girls, who had not given them a moment’s real worry.
“I just know, Es.” Joseph spoke softly, rubbing his head. “Please believe me.” His scalp shone brightly, shiny as linoleum, through his thinning hair.
Esther turned away from the mirror to look directly at her husband, one arm hooked over the back of the chair. Her face was a mask of white, but for her eyes, black as ebony buttons, and her pink mouth, drawn up like a change purse. Even like this, like a snowman she looks, thought Joseph, she was a treasure to him.
“Whatever you say,” Esther said. “Evidently he’s not a gangster anymore. Now the man hangs around with Irving Berlin. Broadway, Joe.” Esther paused, uncharacteristically hesitant about what she was about to say. She held her head high as she looked in the mirror. “Do you want your daughter to be one of those girls in that terrible city who gets a reputation as a tramp in her youth and as a lesbian in her old age? And that, mind you, is only if she ages well.”
“Now come on, Esther,” Joseph said. The previous day Esther had read him something about the problem of single girls in the city, from “Dear Maggie,” the syndicated etiquette column that his wife and her friends phoned one another over daily. Especially since the war, Esther had read, pointing her chin toward Joseph, as if it had all been his fault. She’s your daughter too, Joseph had told her.
Now Joseph turned away from his wife and to the window, the boughs of the evergreen at the side of the yard sagging with last night’s snow. Beyond his yard and down the hill was Casco Bay, where last week Joseph had seen a seal at low tide. Looking up the habits of the harbor seal at the Portland library hours after the sighting, he had had to laugh at himself. How on earth did I get here? he had thought happily, knocking a pencil to the side of his head as he read about molting seasons.
Broadway, thought Joseph. Irving Berlin. Esther went down to New York City all the time now to see Miriam and catch a matinee, and Joseph knew this thrilled her. But Joseph, who’d had to be begged by his wife to move so far north, rarely liked to go back to New York. He liked the peace of his new little town, where he walked to the Penny Wise for milk, removing his hat for the neighbors he passed in the street. He liked his walks through the woods, stomping over moss and earth, the pleasant smell of pine, the call of the lighthouse that blinked in the d
istance through the fog.
The one time Esther had gone with Seymour and Sarah Bloom, she had come home chattering about the house seats and how the Blooms knew the very best places to eat on Broadway. When they came in from the street, a table by a window was waiting just for them, a flickering candle in its center. She made it clear to Joseph that though she didn’t want to live anywhere else but Portland, dinner and a show in that beautiful, beckoning city was a perfect evening.
“Not just off zhe Mob,” Joseph said. “Off a people like you and me.” He slapped his chest. “Good people.”
But Irving Berlin! Joseph got up from the bed, and Esther noticed he did so a bit wearily. He looked up to see his wife rub her own throbbing hands—she’d had to get her wedding ring loosened last month just so it could slide over the knuckles of her once-slender fingers—and clutch the bedpost to stand up. Joseph knew he was no longer the handsome and strong man Esther had once walked arm in arm with by the Charles in the late autumn afternoon, scarlet and mustard-colored leaves swish-swishing in the breeze. And he knew his wife had not planned on a man with a mother who spent most of her time on her cracked front stoop dreaming about Poland, a man whose speech would always betray them. And yet, here she was, still with him.
And Esther? She was no longer the slim girl he’d waited for on the stairwell in that boardinghouse in Cambridge, only to walk with her out into the street. Joseph had tried to make her feel that he would always be waiting for her. Slim. That had been before the kids and before the gallbladder had come out; before she couldn’t stop with the cream cheese and jelly, with the damn Hershey’s. Joseph could see her now, the young girl who left Portland, Maine, for Boston to work at Filene’s Basement. The shoes! And the folding folding folding. She complained she would go mad from it and the way the women pushed their way through her just-folded clothes, snapping them open to check for irregularities.
“Irvink Berlin.” Joseph leaned down to his wife. “It’s true.” He kissed her on the forehead, lingering for a moment to feel the mentholated smell of her cold cream traveling up his nostrils and into his sinuses. When he took his mouth from her face, his mouth was a ring of white and Esther’s forehead was marked with the impression of his lips.
“Nowhere could you have that happy feeling when you aren’t stealing that extra bow,” sang Esther, slightly off-key as always.
My Irving Berlin is different, thought Joseph. “From the mountains to the prairies to the ocean,” he sang to himself. “My home sweet home.” He had been born a million miles away. But this country had been good to him, and though his mother would raise her fist from her new apartment on Riverside Drive and spit on him to hear it, it was true.
“And such a nice family,” Esther said of the Blooms. “Very intellectual.” She wiped the cold cream from her face.
“They are nice,” Joseph said again. “Vestern European.” He shook his head as he said this, remembering his neighborhood, block upon block of Eastern Europeans, and how they all longed to be from music, and art, from the land where they drank tea out of the most delicate of china cups. He was walking toward the bathroom. That side of Europe, they had the culture, it’s true, he thought, one really can’t deny it. And Miriam is in love. But the past. The past.
At the threshold of their bedroom, he turned. “It’s a good match?” he asked his wife.
“It’s a good match, Joe,” Esther said, nodding her head slowly.
Joseph blocked the idea of his daughter’s future father-in-law at the “right” end of a gun. Perhaps all the rumors of Seymour’s involvement with Solomon had not been true, he reasoned. Perhaps Seymour, thanks to his exceptionally good fortune and his high profile on Broadway, was only a victim of bad publicity.
Walking down the hallway to the bathroom, Joseph whistled “God Bless America.” Maybe Mr. Berlin will be at the wedding, he thought. What would I say if I were to meet him? Tell him: our lives are parallel fairy tales. Or perhaps I should prepare a rhyming greeting. Joseph had begun to devise a limerick to make Irving Berlin smile when, upon reaching the bathroom, the image of his brother overwhelmed him.
Bangbangbangbang went his heart. Only it wasn’t love now, as when he saw Esther laughing for the very first time. Who cared she’d laughed at him as his hat spun away into traffic? This was an age-old grief, and for a moment Joseph thought the pain of it would split him in half. His brother. It was unbearable how he missed Solomon. Solomon, who’d left South Fifth Street and come back with more money than God. Joseph remembered the kids pitching pennies on the cracked sidewalk and a horse-drawn ice wagon knocking by as Solomon walked the block in a purple suit that shone when the smallest crease caught the light. Even from here, Joseph could see the Williamsburg Bridge rising out of the East River, tethering his neighborhood to the world.
Sol came in throwing cash from his enormous wads of bills clasped in silver clips, and their mother screamed and ran from it. Joseph laughed now to remember his mother trying not to step in the horse manure on the street as she ran from Solomon’s money. Selma Brodsky had told Joseph that her elder son’s dirty money would scald them both, that their skin would burn as if from acid and would shrink back from their bands of muscle, and what, then, would people see? Joseph had wondered then about his mother’s insides, saddened, ruled by fear. His insides? Hope.
As a boy, Joseph had followed his older brother down the street, crowded with horses and carts and boys playing stickball, on the way to Mr. Berkowitz’s candy store: Wait for me! he’d called out to him. Solly! he’d screamed. And then, just as soon as it had come, the memory was gone again and Joseph was left gripping the cold, clean marble of the counter.
Joseph splashed cold water on his face and looked into the mirror, shaking the image of his mother screeching like a dying animal as she tried to dodge Solomon’s money. Destroyed, she’d say in Yiddish. Mekhule. That was when Joseph had decided he would work hard for money so clean his mother could wrap a baby—his someday—in the bills he would earn for her. And he had.
“Joe?” Esther screamed from the bedroom. “Are you coming to bed?”
“In a moment,” Joseph said, staring into the glass.
Chapter 2
Chemistry: Joseph Brodsky,
1925–1938
MIRIAM WAS GETTING MARRIED.
“Finally,” Esther said to him when they had resolved it for good. “Thank God. After all, she is already twenty-six years old.”
Joseph too was struck by how quickly it had all gone by. How long ago had he and Esther sat holding hands in the taxi rushing to the hospital only to wait and wait for the arrival of their first girl? Nothing had been easy then. 1931. Even to clean was difficult. Back then, Joseph was a door-to-door salesman—he sold soap and cleansers to offices and petrol stations, hospitals and cafeterias, sometimes even to the women in the neighborhoods in between. The housewives would come to the door wiping their hands on their dirty aprons. In the late twenties and early thirties, there was not yet a detergent miscible in both oil and water—cleaning was a multistage process—and so Joseph was forced to carry many bottles, clanking his way from institution to institution with both petroleum solvent and plain old soap.
That was how he’d met Esther. He had moved up to Boston from New York, in part to escape the shadow of his brother, in part to run away from the burden of his father, Herbert Brodsky, who walked from the city over the Williamsburg Bridge, returning each night to a street that Joseph would always remember as filled with weeping. Also dodging shadows, the low, unstable darkness of her mother, Esther had come south to work in Boston after her father, an attorney at the only Jewish law firm in Portland, Maine, had died. One day in 1926, Joseph watched as Esther slammed the door of the taxi and stared up into the sun, her hand shielding her eyes. A red silk scarf covered her head, and, as she craned her neck to look up at the house she was to live in, the scarf slid down to her shoulders, revealing her shining, auburn hair. Joseph ran downstairs to help her with her bags and int
o her room in the building they would share.
“Thank you,” Esther said. Her dark eyes shone as she pressed a coin into Joseph’s palm.
“No.” He laughed. “I don’t vork here. I live here too,” he said. “Downstairs.”
“Oh.” Esther looked at him, confused. She had told her mother this would be a house of women. “Well, thank you for your help then.”
Joseph dropped the coin in Esther’s hand, the tips of his fingers brushing her palm. Esther smiled at Joseph as she pushed the door shut and left him alone in the hallway.
Years later, when they would go to Coney Island and slip into the gypsy’s dark tent, thick with incense, the fortune-teller would grab Esther’s hand and smile as she traced her long life line with her dirty fingers. A long life, she’d tell them. A happy life.
Though Esther Weinstein would not so much as speak to him, Joseph took to her immediately. Something about her manner made him feel completely comfortable and yet entirely disarmed. Esther was both familiar and distant, and for this his love filled him up and spilled over. Yet she resisted his overtures. Did she still believe he was the bellhop? he wondered. No matter how Joseph smiled at her on the stairwell of the building, no matter how he waited for her, hat in his hands, outside on the cobblestone street, she refused him.
“Hello, Miss Weinstein.” Joseph was careful to pronounce the W that began her name as he’d try to fall into step beside her when she left the building to walk along the Charles. He wanted to reach out and touch her dark hair, gleaming red in the sun.
“Mr. Brodsky,” Esther would say, nodding, her eyes fixed on a destination far in front of her.
Why? Joseph wondered if it was how he spoke. From his conversations with Mrs. Steinway, the landlady, Joseph gathered that Esther was well-off. The daughter of an attorney, Mrs. Steinway had said, wagging her finger at Joseph. Recently deceased, she whispered so loudly she may as well have screamed it.
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