Golden Country

by Jennifer Gilmore

  Plain and simple, he loved the smell of the place: the thick heat and the hair spray, the strange mix of dye and shampoo tinged with the faint odor of burning. He loved the polyurethane gloss and the way everything from floor to ceiling seemed to shine. The beauty salon was a theater set to him. It was an escape from life and, at the same time, a whole new life. Watching all the ladies sitting under the bubble hair dryers blowing on their nails as they flipped through magazines and complained about their husbands, David would feel both connected to them and utterly distant from them. It was nothing like the world to which his mother insisted he belonged, and it was this that made him at home within the very brightness of the place, a contrast to the muted colors and dark woods of his parents’ Upper East Side brownstone.

  After Inez had finally let her evening manager take over, she would take David back to her apartment. Most times she would take a long, foaming bath, to remove the burning smell and replace it with the scent of the lavender bath salts she’d had sent from Paris each and every month since she left for America twenty-two years before. Six-year-old David wandered the hallways as she bathed.

  Inez happened to have a very famous neighbor down the hall. When Hollywood’s Production Code of 1934 and Joseph Breen had ruined her career of sexual innuendo and double entendres, not to mention her finances, Mae West returned to Brooklyn. One evening as David meandered aimlessly, dragging his hands along the raised wallpaper, she stood at her door watching him in the darkened hallway. David saw the light shining behind her, and she looked beguiling to him, her voluptuous frame silhouetted in the threshold.

  “And who’s this big boy?” she asked him, shaking her hips.

  “I’m David,” he said, bringing his hands from the velvet of the walls to his sides. “My grandmother lives there.” He pointed to Inez’s door.

  “Inez Bloom,” she said. “Ya don’t say.” Swish swish went the hips. “Mae,” she said, one hand patting her hair, the other held out to David.

  He went over to shake it, peering around her to get a look inside the apartment.

  “Wanna take a look around, sport?” she asked him.

  David shrugged. “Sure,” he said, and she flattened against the doorjamb to let him pass.

  A curious child, David Bloom made his way around Mae West’s rather small apartment, investigating, comparing it with his grandmother’s, which had gold-colored rubber covers on all the doorknobs and opaque plastic runners over the carpets in the hallways. In Inez’s bedroom there were doilies and dusty bottles of Chartreuse on her long wooden bureau. But as David, with Mae West following close on his heels, wandered into her bedroom, all he found was an enormous round bed resting on a circular platform. Looking at the bed, David wondered if it spun, and so he stepped up on the platform, as if he were walking onto a stage, to take a closer look. He looked up to see mirrors covering the ceiling. David saw himself in the mirrors, and then he saw himself taken aback by his own reflection. He then saw himself smile and resisted the urge to wave. Feeling all the blood rush to his head, he turned back to face Mae West.

  “Why do you have mirrors up there?” he asked. Again he looked up to the ceiling, riveted by the upside-down boy.

  Once more she rocked her hips. Her flesh, it seemed to David, moved. “Because when I wake up in the morning,” she said, “I like to see myself.”

  David had not heard his grandmother enter the room, but he saw her come into view, tying her robe, her hair dripping wet from her bath. Now she stood next to this woman. In the mirrors, warped in the spaces where the squares of glass fit together, he saw Inez reach back and bring her hand across Mae West’s face. At the same time, he heard a loud slap. When David turned to look at what was actually happening, Mae West was holding her cheek and Inez Bloom was pointing her finger.

  “To a six-year-old boy!” she said. “Save it for the talkies!” Inez reached for David’s elbow and pulled him out of the apartment.

  As he was being dragged into the dark hallway that smelled of boiled potatoes and chicken fat, David turned to see Mae West laughing, her head ringed with a halo of white curls. She waved good-bye to him, and as he raised his hand to do the same, Inez jerked him out of sight.

  Much later, David would read his encounter with Mae West as destiny, a sign that he was being fingered for his own brand of performing. But when he came home late that evening and told his mother about the woman with a head of blond curls who slept on a circular bed with mirrors covering the ceiling, Sarah Bloom slapped him across the face. “Stay away from her!” she screamed.

  Stunned, his face stinging with his mother’s rare touch, David began to cry. “Why, Mummy?” he asked, both hands cupping his left cheek and backing away. He remembered Mae West laughing at his grandmother’s cruel touch and could not understand it.

  “You don’t know this yet, my darling,” Sarah said.

  David could see she was trying to still her hysteria and undo the damage she had just caused.

  “But your mother was going to be an actress too. In college, I went to Smith College—a very, very good school, not every woman can say she went to Smith—I was the star of every show. Everyone came to see me. Me! And now, now who comes to see me?”

  David looked up at her blankly.

  “We do, Sarah,” Seymour said. “Your family.” He had been listening in the hallway. He went to stand by his son, placing a sure hand on his shoulder. My goodness, he thought. All this talk of what she might have been had long ago become unbearable. Smith this, Smith that, the classes, the goddamn queues of boys to the friggin’ moon. Her wasted life, it was going to ruin them all.

  Sarah looked up to see her husband and son standing across the room together. She paused for a moment, and, for a moment, Seymour and David both saw something soften in her. It passed over her face as if it had come from outside her, and then, as quickly as it had come, it was gone.

  “My family,” Sarah said, and, laughing nearly maniacally, she threw herself back on the bed. “What a hoot!”

  They could not live like this much longer. Seymour knew he had to do something or his children would suffer badly. He leaned down to hold his son’s stinging face, as if to erase the impact of his wife’s angry hand.

  “It’s nothing,” he told David, pretending to strike his son on the chin. “Let that be the worst sock in the puss you ever get,” he said as Mary came to take David and put him to bed.

  Seymour watched his son look at him with those huge, searching eyes as the housekeeper took him by the hand and led him to bed.

  Chapter 4

  Reading:

  Frances Verdonik, 1925

  FRANCES VERDONIK WAS nothing short of shocked when she got the invitation to the Bloom-Brodsky wedding in Portland, Maine. How these two families could be more intertwined, she didn’t know, but she had never imagined that David Bloom and Miriam Brodsky would find each other again. As she removed the tissue that hovered above the engraved script on the ivory invitation—fancy, fancy, she thought—Frances had a vague memory that she had introduced them years and years ago, at the World’s Fair. What a matchmaker I am, she thought, though they had been only eight years old at the time. That had been a wonderful day, thought Frances.

  Poor Joseph. He had worked so hard to stay clean, stay away from the shadow of his older brother, and now this. Though she had heard that Seymour Bloom was no longer involved in the Mob, how he could have gotten out, she had no idea. She had never heard of anyone leaving unscathed. Charlie Kellerman had tried, and his entire family had been killed. Everyone but Charlie, who Frances had heard ran a lettuce stand at a roadside farmers’ market upstate. Seymour had certainly been the oddest gangster, with this thing he had for the theater. Who else would be getting crates of illegal liquor from Long Island, or taking another useless canary to his death while talking the whole way about the wonders of Gershwin?

  But she would be at the wedding. Of course she would—she and Joseph had been through everything together. And though
she had been married to Vladimir now for twenty-eight years, Frances had been in love with Joseph Brodsky since she was old enough to walk down the street and see him sitting on the stoop beside his mother. It was the kind of love that is also childhood and memory and everything good that comes up and kisses you from the past.

  As Joseph sat next to his mother, his head on her squared shoulders, Selma Brodsky looked ahead with a steely gaze. Frances knew the look from wishing that her own mother wore it, that Rose Verdonik would buck up against the neighborhood, which seemed determined to drag her family’s name into the ground and bury it there.

  Frances never got Joseph Brodsky, she would always reason, because of her older sister, Pauline. Now she was grateful for the way her life turned, but it really had been Pauline who had ruined everything, from the moment her family stepped foot on New York concrete. From the day Rose and Abraham Verdonik came from Russia—in 1912, when Frances was just three years old—every single resource had been poured into her, and what were they rewarded with?

  Pauline running off with that no-good thug, Solomon Brodsky.

  Frances and Pauline’s father, Abraham Verdonik, sold insurance. When there was any extra money—very rarely, as it turned out, because insurance wasn’t the first thing on an immigrant’s mind—it went toward a dress with puffed sleeves for Pauline, dance lessons for Pauline, satin hair ribbons for Pauline. The whole neighborhood knew that, out of all of them, the one most likely to be a true and blue American was Pauline. It was as if young Frances existed only to smile enviously at her sister.

  Unlike the perfectly proportioned Pauline, Frances was wide on the bottom and tapered on top, like a pear. And because she developed hair early in life, before waxing was common, before the days of depilatory cream (this would be invented by a rabbi from Esther’s hometown of Portland, Maine, nearly two decades after Frances began to develop her mustache), Frances was forced into a close relationship with tweezers. Two hairs sprouted from her chin, and each week Frances plucked them.

  Her sister, Pauline, was the beauty on whom even Franny had pinned all the family’s hopes. Placing a stack of books on her sister’s head, Frances would stand at one end of the room and coax Pauline toward her. Good, she’d say. Hold your head up higher, she’d say. There! And Pauline would glide in her socks across the room. They practiced the wave with no space between the fingers, and a closed-lip smile, because they were going to win Pauline a scholarship to school via the Miss America contest or be damned. And then Pauline would take Frances everywhere she was going. After all, they had been to Atlantic City and had seen those girls waving as they jerked by on their pathetic little floats. Pauline Verdonik was much more beautiful than any of those girls from Wyoming and Mississippi, and if everybody in Brooklyn didn’t know it then, at least Pauline and Frances did.

  When she thought about it, Frances believed she could pin it all on Eli Horowitz’s bar mitzvah. Solomon Brodsky did not notice Pauline until that day, which was also the day, legend has it, that he met A. R. Rothstein, the notorious bootlegger.

  That had been some party. Frances had never seen anything like it—the sturgeon, the herring, the plates of smoked salmon sliced as thin and fine as writing paper. Never had she seen so much food. And the chopped liver molded into the shape of a swan, the neck as smooth and curved as if it had been blown from glass. After the ceremony that had marked Eli’s passage into manhood in the eyes of God (but not in the opinion of Frances, who found him doughy and immature), she watched Solomon saunter over to a group of young men, nudging his way into the circle of them.

  “Wiseguys!” Frances heard Hester Black, the horrible gossip who made the best rugeleh on South Fifth Street, whisper to her daughter. She saw her neighbor shake her fist in the air as her face reddened.

  Frances watched Solomon penetrate that cruel circle as she made her way over to the chopped liver swan. Perhaps she felt the relative equilibrium of her world begin to tip and wobble, because a violence welled up in her that she had never before experienced. She saw Solomon pointing his finger, laughing, and she saw her sister, Pauline, preening in the distance, surrounded by their father’s friends. Solomon looked out from the group and, from across the room, settled his gaze on Pauline, whom he appeared to be seeing now for the first time. His cold stare, saved for men, softened on Pauline, as if he were accepting the heat of the sun. This was the very first time Frances saw the difference between herself and her sister, and she discovered that she would never be entitled to such a glance, that no one would look up and be stunned by her. Joseph, who stood with his mother, nodding with three old women from the neighborhood, hardly even cast a glance in Frances’s direction. Unlike Pauline, whose lovely surface—a gorgeous, ornate cover—begged opening, Frances was a complicated text that would require careful reading. She knew that she would not be leaving, that she would be stuck watching Hester Black and Charlotte Meyer bitch and moan about the price of herring and potatoes on the front stoop each evening for her whole life, and so she took the silver-plated knife and swiped the chopped liver swan right across the neck.

  It was a bloodless beheading, but for one brief moment the swan was alive. And then it seemed like it was dying. Its head, eyes set with pitted black olives, seemed to look over at Franny, a sad plea that asked her why, before it fell to the floor, losing its elegant shape. Still the olive-eye looked up at her from its smashed face, and for the first time in a long while Frances felt relief. She resisted the urge to step on its head with her Mary Janes, dress shoes that had once been Pauline’s, but her imagination took her to a place where she could squash the face beyond recognition.

  Not a week later, Solomon left the neighborhood and, everyone heard, changed his name to Terry the Terrier—bark worse than his bite. He began working for A. R. Rothstein and Maxie Greenberg from Illinois. The ladies all shook their heads, and no one stopped to visit Selma Brodsky anymore. Why why why? the women of the neighborhood asked one another, clutching their stomachs as if they were suffering from indigestion. But Frances thought even then that she understood. She had watched the boys of the neighborhood spend their youth on broken sidewalks, owned by those tough Italians and Irish thugs. Solomon was a small, thick man, and Frances knew there was safety in a group, authority in its membership. Who didn’t feel bigger when able to part crowds because of a couple of powerful friends? She too would have liked that feeling, to walk into the world inside a gang of people, entirely protected from cruelty. At least, Frances reasoned, she had her sister.

  Rumor had it the three men started speedboating liquor across Lake Michigan from Canada into Chicago and Detroit, and ended up with an operation shipping whiskey from England across the Atlantic to the coast of Montauk, an unprotected point in the middle of the sound. And from there they’d bring the cases to shore and ship them off to warehouses in Manhattan. Then off to the nightclubs, which, Frances would soon learn from her sister, saved the best seats in the house for the Terrier and anyone who came with him.

  From her window ledge, where Frances used to sit and dangle one leg out into the world, free from the claustrophobic apartment and her mother’s incessant cleaning, she would watch Solomon come back to the neighborhood in three-hundred-dollar suits to strut down Lorimer, hands jiggling change in his pockets and smoking a cigar. Young boys peered around the corner just to get a look at him.

  Her sister always leaned over Frances, practically knocking her out into the street. “Look at that,” Pauline said. “Do you see him? I bet he has an automobile.”

  Frances shrugged. “Well then, why doesn’t he drive it?” she asked.

  Pauline looked hard at her sister. “Because the car, which I’m sure has a top that folds down, is for rides in the country. Brooklyn would only get it dirty.”

  “Really?” Frances asked.

  “Of course, Franny.” Pauline folded her arms across her chest. “He could have any girl he wanted, you know,” she told her sister.

  Frances was silent but for t
he knocking of her shoe against the brownstone. The sound of the thud against the house always made her mother scream that she would scuff her shoes, which in turn made Frances kick harder.

  “Anyone,” Pauline said. Then she looked Frances in the eye. “But mark my words, it’s going to be me.”

  Not everyone wanted what the Terrier had. It was cheating God to get such riches from stealing. And cheating God, well, not even a gangster could get away with that.

  The women who did not necessarily disdain the Terrier, like Rose Verdonik, Frances’s mother, felt sorry for him. Poor boys, she’d say to her girls whenever news spread that Solomon had come around. Here’s Solomon and his friend from the whosewutz, she’d say. Poor boys, she’d say in Yiddish. Farblondzhet. They are the lost ones, she’d say, speaking of that horrible space that yawned between the parents who came over and their kids who had no idea from where their parents came.

  The way the family, the neighbors, the shopkeepers, made Pauline feel so damn special simply for her curvaceous but slender figure and her lovely doll’s face made Pauline feel she had a congenital right to a life better than the one she was living in a two-bedroom walk-up in Williamsburg.

  “Franny,” Pauline said as she brushed out her hair, “aren’t you tired of watching Mommy’s sad face? And Daddy at that grimy kitchen table?”

  Frances shrugged.

  “Well, what do they think anyway? They barely speak any English! My God, Franny, my looks will be gone by the time I get outta here!”

  “What about Miss America?” Franny asked her sister. “You’ll win that, Paw-Paw. Then we’ll be famous!”

  “We’ll be famous?” Pauline shook her head, and Frances would never forget the condescending expression that she had wanted to tear from her sister’s face.