The erudite Sarah, he remembered now, was always a girl of exaggerated, ill-fitting parts. What she held in stature, which he had thought unusual for any girl, let alone a girl of Sarah’s age, she lacked in general prettiness. Hers was an acquired beauty, as one might have said of Bette Davis had one never beheld her on the screen. Sarah looked as if her body had been stretched in an accidental, haphazard fashion. Her neck was swan-long, nearly begging strangulation, and her nose was as long and thin as a swizzle stick.
Seymour would never know why she chose him, though he would marvel at it often—was it to have a single place to put all the blame for everything she’d never have? He often wondered if, when they’d crashed into each other on the ice that day, she hadn’t been literally jolted out of her mind.
Although she was an intellectual girl—always with that long nose in the Shakespeare, the Chaucer—Seymour knew it was Sarah’s body that reached for him that day. He had felt it as she sat across from him, sipping cocoa after their collision, Seymour’s young brother spinning on the ice and waving; he could see her rising in her seat, hovering, her skin buzzing with happiness. When he reached out to touch her hand, a shock passed between them, and he knew that, would he like to have her, Sarah would be his.
Perhaps Seymour did not see then that he picked his wife primarily for her fine hair and the very awkwardness that, for some reason, translated to him not as clumsiness but as a sort of elegance, as if Sarah was above certain learned rules of conduct. The way she threw her head back when she laughed did seem to him to be good breeding, making her appear both young and old at the same time. And soon he would discover that her wit would make them the axis on which many parties spun, so much so that when they turned to leave there was always a general hush, as if the guests simply could not continue on without them.
Seymour and Sarah were married in 1925, just after the posthumous publication of Kafka’s The Trial. Sarah received a copy from her friend Celia. “Perfect reading for the honeymoon!!” Celia had written on the card. “Have a ducky time!” Sarah used the card as a bookmark, and every time Seymour saw it he cringed.
The morning after the wedding—a Long Island affair, with a reception on the lawn that went well into the evening, swooping beams of light, floor-length dresses stained with newly cut grass and champagne—Sarah Bloom woke up inconsolable.
“What is it, my dear?” Seymour turned to ask her. He could see Signal Hill from their room at the new Montauk Manor, where they had spent their wedding night, a car having whisked them away and driven them almost as far east as the road would take them.
“It’s nothing,” she told him.
But he wouldn’t have it. Why was his wife crying? Last night, while all the guests were milling about eating canapés before dinner, Sarah had been the kind of woman he had never dreamed he would have. Thank you, she told the guests as they made their way down the receiving line to her, Yes, it’s true, she agreed with them, smiling, always touching their hands in the exact place they wanted their hands to be touched.
“What is it, my love?” Seymour reached out to touch her hair.
Sarah sighed. “Am I really to spend my life with a man who actually goes door to door selling things?”
Seymour rolled away from her, stunned. She hadn’t seemed to mind his occupation last night when, high as a kite on champagne, she tore off her wedding dress with abandon and got down on her knees. “Come here, Sy,” she’d said, winking, and he’d moved to the edge of the bed and watched her mouth, free from the red lipstick he had never seen her lips without, move toward him, smiling.
That had been here; his legs had dangled over this very bed as she had moved to him, her mouth opening. “What would you have me do, Sarah?” he asked her now.
“The thing is”—she put the back of her hand to her head, dramatizing her evident hangover—“what else can you do?” She turned onto her stomach, her ear to the pillow. “Nothing, I’m afraid.”
“Surely you don’t mean nothing, Sarah,” he said, but was met by silence.
Seymour hated her then, this woman who had been his wife for less than twenty-four hours and had already turned against him. He knew then and there that he would live his life not to please her but to make sure she never had the opportunity to speak to him this way again.
It would be nearly twenty-five years before Arthur Miller would expose onstage the terrible emptiness of the salesman, but still Sarah did not hesitate to tell Seymour that her life was like that of the wife of a beggar. How could she live as she was accustomed on his small commissions?
And so Sarah soon welcomed the financial support of her father, an act she flaunted to her new husband.
“Do you like my dress?” She’d twirl before him in her brand-new Adrian. The way the crepe de chine was cut and how it joined together again against the grain, at peculiar angles, shooting her body through with light when she moved, had made Sarah have to have the extravagant gown she had seen from the street and tried on just for fun. When Seymour reached out to feel the exquisite fabric, she slapped his hand away. “This wasn’t a gift from you, my dear. This was from Daddy.”
“My darling”—there was hardly a time when she did not speak down to him—“I cannot go with out,” she’d say. Dragging him to the opera, to the ballet, to the theater, she’d tell him, “A girl cannot live a life without art!”
Though Seymour’s mother had coveted glamour, art had been the last thing on her mind when her children were growing up. Seymour knew his mother wondered why she had even come to this country, especially after dark, when the underworld rose to the surface of their Brownsville neighborhood and the screams of young men being knifed and the shattering of glass sounded through the streets. There was no way to go out and have any fun.
In Brooklyn, how far had Inez been from her own mother, braiding challah on the rue des Rosiers? Three streets over was the fish market; they could all hear the men’s Yiddish screams overlapping when she strolled with the two boys in the afternoons. Yiddish! Inez always told Seymour it was a peasants’ language. “I thought this was the new world!” she’d despair to her son. “Might as well just have traveled east in Europe,” she’d say.
Basic needs—and later, in his teenage years, money for fancy dresses—were her main preoccupation. We lived generically, Seymour would say.
Because Inez did not have the means to provide access to things cultural, she had always debunked them as homosexual. In fact, all things that Seymour yearned for but could not have—gold cuff links, for instance, box seats at the opera, a white room filled with natural light—Inez labeled homosexual, so much so that Seymour began to associate the word with wealth and possibility, with things longed for but utterly unattainable.
But Sarah insisted on art, and so it was with her that Seymour went to the theater and lost himself completely for the first time. Each and every time a production ended, the lights coming up, Seymour felt he was waking from a dream. In his daily life, he’d always been aware of his surroundings—the terrible ticking clock, the changing weather, the people passing by on the street. There was no escape from reality. Even while making love to his wife, Seymour did not experience what many of his friends discussed over scotch and cigars and what he had read about occasionally in the magazines he had hidden under his mattress as an adolescent. He had imagined the sensation would be science, a burst of energy and pressure, a subsequent release of reality, as if one were spinning into space for one moment at a fraction of the speed of sound or light. But sex was not so for Seymour. Though he had orgasms, they were nearly clinical in their arrival. The theater—especially musical theater, with its silliness and gaiety—transported him to a time and place that was entirely and deliciously other. Theater was an experience that was closer to living.
In a way, going to the theater brought him back to the year he turned fourteen, when he would watch his mother play hostess at the Joint, a Harlem club owned by the cruel Madame Lutille. Somehow in Brownsville, the slum infested by c
ockroaches and gangsters where Seymour grew up, Inez had managed to go around with what he’d thought surely was the only Jewish boxer in New York but turned out to be one of many tough Jews from Brooklyn, and the two held court there. Joe Crews was on a winning streak, and all the celebrities went to shake his meaty hand. Inez had, in turn, bullied them, using her French as a weapon.
“Non, non!” she’d say, wagging her finger. “C’est pas comme ça.”
“Bonjour,” she’d say, stretching out her language.
She always found a way to tell them no. No table by the window. No book of matches. No, I’m so sorry, but there is simply no more caviar. When it was said in French, everyone seemed pleased.
An inveterate pessimist, Inez managed each month to put a little aside to save for her beauty shop, the one she had been eyeing since she came to this country. The rest of the money was spent on fashion—a green tulle gown by Madeleine et Madeleine, a Paul Poiret evening coat.
Despite the recent Volstead Act, which ratified the Eighteenth Amendment, prohibiting the sale of alcohol, the Joint managed, for a while, to thrive.
Over the years at the club, Seymour saw Irving Berlin sip a French 75 as he leaned in to Edna Ferber at the corner table. And when Benny Leonard won the world lightweight boxing championship, Seymour was there as the whole world came to the Joint to celebrate his title.
But that had been almost a decade before Seymour married Sarah. Now he would never be able to take his wife by there and trick her into believing that Inez owned the fabulous place. The Joint had been destroyed by Prohibition and the brain damage Joe Crews received when fighting a Catholic boxer. Inez kept him in the back room, and she would bring him carrots mashed by the cook. Eventually the lack of liquor and the absence of a celebrity boxer to anchor the clientele had forced the place to close, and now the Joint was a boarded-up old storefront in a neighborhood where kids stood on the corners, waiting for someone to give them something to do.
The theater spoke to Seymour the way the Joint had spoken to his mother. But all those evenings of Sunny and No, No, Nanette—the Cinderella musicals, which Seymour loved because the heroines always started poor and ended rich—were funded by Sarah’s father. Each Sunday, Fritz Rosen would come over and ask about his son-in-law’s prospects, a word Seymour had once loved, as it had meant all things possible, but soon began to despise, as it came to mean everything improbable.
Sarah felt her husband could make up for the deficiency of his education and social class only with money. She did not hesitate to tell him this, and neither did her father, who had insisted that they take a place on Manhattan’s Upper East Side—the least attractive place he would allow his only daughter to live.
“I am not a girl of the boroughs,” Sarah, who had grown up on Long Island, would say.
“Oh, Sarah,” Seymour would tell her. “Please.” Why hadn’t he married one of those nice girls who worked in his mother’s shop, on which she had just three years ago signed a ninety-nine-year lease? Seymour had watched the Greek who owned the place turn the corner, headed back to postwar Athens, a place far easier to navigate than Prohibition America. Why, Seymour wondered, hadn’t he chosen someone who would be happy with what is, as opposed to what should be and should be and should be?
Seymour had no plans to be a salesman for the rest of his life. With or without Sarah’s taunting, he was going to be someone, someone else. He thought of those limos pulling up in front of the Joint, the stars lingering on the sidewalk in their jeweled gowns and cloche hats, waiting to be photographed. That blinding white light of a bulb popping bright. Like Inez, who spent all her money on dresses to impress this clientele, and deceive them into believing that it was she who was running things, Seymour loved the money of the whole affair. He loved the decadence. But most of all, when he sat down and really thought of it, Seymour loved the theatricality—everyone equaled by the accoutrements and the drama of the arrival.
For now, however, Seymour was only a handsome man next to whom most women wanted to stand, and so Sarah’s father supplemented their rent as well as their entertainment, gradually, yet efficiently, emasculating Seymour Bloom.
Seymour knew from the wash of grief he encountered upon his return from a day of trudging around town with cumbersome adding machines that Sarah did not spend her days like other married women. Other married women passed their time with women like themselves. They prepared food for their husbands. And they took care of their children.
Their children. Dulcy, their first child, was born in 1927, the month after The Jazz Singer hit the screen. Sarah had gone to see Al Jolson star in the first feature-length film that everyone was talking about, not realizing how uncomfortable she would be after only forty-five minutes. She’d cursed her unborn child for all that it was making her give up as she dragged Seymour out of the theater.
Dulcy was born before the Panic, but by the time their second child, David, was born, in October 1931, the world had truly turned black. Seymour preferred to see it differently. Seymour saw the birth of his first son as the year the George Washington Bridge was finished, hovering like nothing short of a miracle over the Hudson and connecting New York to New Jersey. It was the year the tallest building in the world, the Empire State, opened. Seymour couldn’t get over these two feats, progress he’d never believed he’d see in his lifetime. New York was growing even if the rest of the world seemed in danger of falling away.
Sarah Bloom’s life, and the world as she had known it, she reasoned, had ended. Sarah had all but given up. She had taken to what she called dancing but what anyone who watched her would call dressing up like a strumpet and drinking in the basement.
Mary, the housekeeper, another basic need paid for by Fritz Rosen, who insisted that one servant was the very least in help any young family needed, told Seymour about the way Sarah stashed Prohibition liquor in the basement and spent most of the day down there, listening to ragtime and crying to beat the band.
“She’s a dreamer, Mr. Bloom,” Mary told her employer one evening when Sarah had gone up to bed. Mary left out the way Sarah, her red lipstick smeared across her mouth, which gave the effect of having been punched, had told her, “You know, Mary, my mind is dying from neglect.” Mary had nodded her head. “I might as well pickle the damn thing.” Sarah had laughed. Some days, she leaned in close to Mary, who could smell the whiskey on her breath so strong she had to turn away. “What do you think it would have been like to be born a man?” Sarah had asked.
Mary didn’t tell Seymour any of this. “I just thought you should know she doesn’t seem content,” she said. “And also, I found this.” Mary handed Seymour a balled-up piece of paper. “I found this letter on Mrs. Bloom’s desk.”
“Thank you, Mary,” Seymour said, reaching slowly for the letter.
As she turned to leave, he looked down at the crinkled sheet with the kind of dread he thought was saved for ringing strangers’ doorbells. Who would it be and would they purchase anything from him? Most often, he knew, they would not. Now Seymour wished that Mary had never told him anything. Perhaps his wife’s misery, her unused potential, could have gone unspoken between them for a lifetime. Would that have been so bad? And now whatever was in his hands would be some awful concrete evidence of her unhappiness. He hated letters for this reason. Seymour never wanted to know what anyone felt—it would pass, like everything—but a letter, he reasoned, keeps it there as if it had never left. Love was like that too, he knew. He wished now he had never written Sarah love letters so he would never have proof that once he might have loved her.
Would having once loved her make the present more or less difficult? He couldn’t even begin to wonder. Seymour read:
Dear Celia:
Sometimes I get to thinking about how it was on the stage at Smith. Remember playing Rosalind to my Celia? What a swell time that was, Smith. Acting! And I didn’t even know it. How silly not to have looked around at all those women so hard at work, studying, and not to have wondered
where on earth there would be room in the world for all of us! But Smith was cruel—it made me feel like I could be anything. What a dreadful setup, Seal! Did everyone but me know we’d be coming back to this?
He felt the relief pour out of him. A letter to her friend from college. Well, this is all, Seymour thought. Who didn’t want to be young and have the chance to do it all over again? This was nothing. This, Seymour decided, was perfectly normal.
Who saved poor David Bloom from his mother’s despair? It was Inez Bloom, who discovered that she could show her grandson the affection she could never bestow on her own children. It was all she could do when she saw David not to cover him with kisses. “Ucch!” she’d exclaim, shaking him. Someone who saw them on the street and didn’t know Inez might have thought her angry. “I love you to pieces!” she’d scream.
I want Nana, David would cry at night, and, wishing to please his son and keep him from his wife, a rag doll in silk pajamas in their bed, Seymour, when he had the means to do so, would send David down in a company car to his mother. David would look out across the East River as the car made its way down Second Avenue, to Broadway and onto the Brooklyn Bridge. He loved that bridge, because he knew it brought him to Inez and away from his mother. David would think of her in a terrible heap at the bottom of the stairs as he headed toward the bridge and to his grandmother’s.
Brooklyn was safety. In contrast to Seymour, who felt only relief finally to leave Brooklyn and be embraced by the riches of the once untouchable and in-the-distance Manhattan, David looked to the right to see the Statue of Liberty and the little red house of Ellis Island, and felt Brooklyn to be offering its open arms.
Just to sit twirling in a chair at the counter of that pink room, bells jingling as the ladies sauntered in and out of the shop, bags hooked around their elbows, filled him with joy. “Davey Davey!” they’d say, tickling his chin. Some brought him peppermints and cherry licorice, the tips of their long nails brushing his skin as they dropped the candy into his cupped palms. He’d watch them walk away, bobbing in their high heels, and brim over with admiration.
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