Golden Country

by Jennifer Gilmore

  “Us,” Frances said meekly.

  “Silly girl. It will be me. And anyway, you have to have money to win. Money to play and money to win. That’s what I need.”

  “I thought it didn’t matter.” Frances felt as if she would cry.

  “It matters. Believe me,” Pauline said. “Money is all that matters.”

  Solomon came back to strut on South Fifth Street by day, but he also headed back late at night, sneaking around to take out the girl he had watched turn into a woman, the girl he had seen from across the room. And here he was in his flashy suits, with his flashy cash, his flashy driver, this man whose wingtips shone so bright you could see your reflection in them, whom Pauline and Frances had known when he was a young boy playing stickball in the street at twilight. And now he came for Frances’s sister, to take her into that city over which they had watched the sun lighten and set their whole lives in America.

  Frances would always remember the nights Pauline went out with the Terrier. He would sneak around the side of the brownstone and throw pebbles at the window from the tiny alley late at night. Often Frances would let Pauline, whose indelicate snoring blocked out most noise, stay asleep. Then she would go to the window and, through the ripped screen, look down to little Solomon, all dressed up and shiny, waiting for Pauline to join him out on the town.

  “Hi, Sol,” Frances would say, throwing up the window in her nightgown. She imagined, as she leaned her hips against the window frame, that she had breasts. The warped wood from the sill dug into her stomach. This is what it would be like to be courted, she thought, breathing in the night air.

  “Fran!” Solomon would say, always playing along. He’d take off his trilby and hold it over his heart. “Are you gonna be my girl tonight?”

  Frances would giggle. Then he’d be Solomon again, not this horrible gangster who dealt in all things illegal, thumbing his nose at all he’d been brought up on. Franny loved this brief time when Solomon pretended to call up to her, until Pauline, whose snores could not drown out her suitor’s loud whispering, ran to the window and pushed Frances out of the way.

  After Pauline had powdered her stockings and colored her lips and run out the door to meet the Terrier, Frances would lie awake in bed waiting for her to come home. Frances would lie on her back looking up at the water-stained ceiling and try to imagine her sister walking the downtown streets on the Terrier’s arm. This is what it’s like to be left behind, Frances thought as she imagined her sister dancing the Charleston. She’d had so little experience outside her street, Frances couldn’t really picture a thing. But when Pauline would come home smelling of the world outside their apartment—cigarettes and perfume and rum and night air—Frances would always equate this with the smell of becoming an adult.

  No one but Frances had an inkling that Pauline would be leaving. Frances knew of her sister’s nights out, her impatience, and too many of her dreams: a mink stole draped over her neck, peacock-plumed hats, a large house surrounded by wooden fencing and supported by columns, in the manner of the South, Pauline would tell her. And in 1925 there was no other way for a Jewish girl from Eastern Europe living in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, to achieve these dreams than through a long white veil, a crushed glass, a clutch of yellow rosebuds.

  When Pauline entered the steaming kitchen one stifling summer evening, Rose Verdonik was mopping the floor vigilantly, sweat pouring from her brow; Abraham was wearing his spectacles and reading The Rise of David Levinsky to Frances for the third time. He was trying to understand how this Yiddish-speaking man was able to write so well—so realistically!—in English when Pauline leaned against the door frame.

  She said to her parents, “Don’t be angry.” She said, “Please don’t be angry with me, but I’m going to marry Solomon Brodsky.”

  Rose dropped her mop, Abraham gasped, and they both looked at their elder daughter, stunned.

  “Who?” Abraham said. “What?”

  Frances looked down at her feet and wriggled her toes.

  Rose resumed scrubbing the floor furiously. “You heard her,” she said in Yiddish. “That gangster, with the glitzy clothes and the glitzy life. What kind of a girl…” Her voice trailed off.

  Frances remembered being dragged by her mother to see her old friend Selma Brodsky—Solomon’s mother, shunned by the neighborhood since the day Solomon drove away—when she thought no one was looking. They would sneak down the street, Rose pretending they were heading out for milk and eggs, and then Rose would quickly yank on Frances’s wrist and dodge up the stairs to Selma’s. The two women would talk about old times, what their lives had been like before something like this—as in this—could ever happen, and Frances loved the ease between them, something she rarely saw in her frenetic mother. Which was worse? they’d joke over herring, the Cossacks or summer in Brooklyn?

  Joseph was there too, at the bottom of the stairs, wondering just who would be coming over now. He already seemed old to Frances, who occasionally would muster up the courage to go to him and, leaning on the banister, her chin on her hands, ask him about school or the weather or baseball. Joseph would answer factually: I’m studying chemistry, it has been a hot summer, isn’t it awful about Babe Ruth’s ulcer? But all Frances really wanted to know was what it was like to be him, in his Joseph skin, to have his particular fingers and toes, and to walk in the world as he walked.

  Everything goes into this girl, and now she is leaving for a common criminal? “I can’t even think about it,” Rose mumbled to herself in Yiddish as she continued to mop.

  “Mommy,” Pauline said, hesitating. “He’s not a criminal.”

  Abraham was silent. He leaned his head to the right and then to the left, removing his wire spectacles. He closed the Cahan novel and watched his wife in her frenzy of cleaning. “Rose, please!” he said. “This won’t help.” He stood and placed his hand at the small of his wife’s back to still her.

  But it was Abraham who couldn’t think about it. Had Pauline tried to pry apart her father’s chest and slice open his slippery heart before she had gone and broken it, she would have found only ghosts inside. The ghosts of his mother and father, the spirit of a sister he had watched being taken. The ghost of his elder daughter was the last he could fit inside that beating organ. Frances knew, she could see it in the way her father’s back was sinking before her eyes, that this final haunting bore down on him with its fogged, spiritual weight, and, like his friends who worked on the East Side and walked over the bridge night after night, Abraham could no longer stand up straight. On the night Pauline told the Verdoniks she was leaving, Abraham took to his bed.

  The next day, Pauline was gone, already a memory.

  Frances remembered the two of them playing marbles on the cracked sidewalk, their father walking out the door with his scratched leather briefcase. She thought of her sister, her tiny, delicate feet in Rose’s button boots, shuffling across the room. She remembered Pauline’s lovely face just the year before, the two of them perched by the open window, Rhapsody in Blue spilling in from a neighbor’s radio.

  She couldn’t think about it either. The way her father had worked and worked, only to have their names sullied by the likes of Solomon Brodsky. How her sister had ended up with a man who went by the name the Terrier, who hung around with that infamous Meyer Lansky, was beyond her. How could this be the same girl who had played stickball with Frances and the boys on their street? That had been before Pauline discovered that she was beautiful. And before Frances discovered that she was not. It was before they knew that they were not like boys, that they would never get for themselves what boys could get. Pauline, with her long, thin arms, had batted the ball, and it rolled between Solomon Brodsky’s legs, all the way down the block to Mr. Berkowitz’s candy store. Frances ran after it, the protective eye of her older sister behind her as she peered inside the store, its chocolates wrapped in golden foil stacked in the window. That was when she heard the ever-present voice of her mother: Eating outside the house! her mother
screamed in Yiddish. The dysentery! she yelled, her hand over her heart. Frances had picked up the ball from the street and turned away from the window to run back toward her sister, toward Joseph, forgetting for a moment the unfamiliar longing to reach for those golden candies, and for just one second to have a look inside.

  Frances always reasoned that it was the way the neighborhood and his family turned on Solomon Brodsky that had made him run away with her sister. Why else? Solomon had the money, the high, flashy life, and a gang that protected him from the kike-hating world. But even young Frances knew he had lost the love of his father.

  After Pauline left, Frances sat on the stoop each night, watching the men walk across the Williamsburg Bridge, returning to their American shtetls. She watched Herbert Brodsky, a man who had once stood on the top step three doors down watching his boys play marbles. He had screamed at them about America’s promise. Goldene medina, my boys, he’d told them night after night. “For you,” he’d tell Joseph and Solomon, leaning down, his arm hooked to each boy’s rigid shoulder, “I promise you a golden country.”

  All the men seemed to walk burdened by that horrible weight of promises made to their children. Watching Herbert, who seemed even more stooped than before, Frances imagined that somehow it was the children who were meant to lift the heaviness.

  Though she never heard him say so, it was obvious that Mr. Brodsky knew exactly what his elder son did for a living. Mr. Brodsky used to ruffle Solomon’s hair and call him his “little kaddishel.” Of course it would be him, the older boy, who would say Kaddish for his father when he died. When Sol made himself into the Terrier, though, and began to wear his hair slicked back and high with pomade, smoke cigars, and run around with all kinds of reckless women, Mr. Brodsky started calling Joseph “kaddishel.”

  Well, who the heck wants to be on the wrong side of God? Frances wondered. She imagined that when the old ladies averted their watery eyes, when the young mothers swung their children to the opposite hip from where Solomon stood, when his father turned instead to Joseph, Solomon must have gotten scared. Didn’t he know that God sees everything?

  The Verdonik and Brodsky families had known each other in Russia. In the same village, Selma and Rose had kneaded the challah; their fathers had prayed together, their knees bending as they davened toward the light. And when the Verdoniks fled, when Frances was just three years old, the Brodskys were not long to follow.

  In Pauline, perhaps, Solomon could be redeemed. A nice Jewish girl from the neighborhood, before the eyes of God, before the eyes of his all-knowing father.

  The night Pauline snuck away with the Terrier, Frances woke up from a terrible dream. In it, she and her sister were alone at Ellis Island, holding hands as the man with his mean mustache stamped their arrival, just as he had thirteen years before, only now they were older girls. In her dream, their parents weren’t with them, and the man stamped their papers and told them they would have a new name: “Green,” he told them, his meaty hands, fingers with bitten nails and bloody cuticles, gripping the bloodred stamp. “Like money,” he said, laughing. And then, suddenly, Pauline was gone, flying into the throng of people, all waiting to cross over into Manhattan. Franny looked behind her in her dream, and she found that all the Russians in queues to the water had turned to skeletons. Their skin was melting from their tiny Russian bones when Frances woke up, calling for her sister.

  But Pauline was gone.

  Frances got up and took out a piece of writing paper and a pencil and began to write:

  Dear Pauline: How could you leave me here alone?

  But she stopped herself. Where on earth would she send a letter to her sister now?

  News of Pauline’s exodus with a mobster and Abraham’s condition traveled quickly through the neighborhood. All were startled. Abraham Verdonik had worked hard; he had become a respected man in the community. Besides, the insurance. He held the slips of paper with their lives scratched on them, how much each member of the community was worth to his or her family, sick or dead. All the insurance that man sold, and he hadn’t taken a policy out on himself! There were so many things that needed paying for, like Pauline’s ribbons, socks fringed with lace, which as she got older turned to stockings, a tortoiseshell compact that she demanded.

  Though on the surface it was true he favored her older sister, Frances knew that this was merely the shell of his affection, that somewhere in the lovely, breakable egg of her father’s love, the yolk was hers. And Frances’s heart had always belonged to her father. While her mother’s nervousness had overtaken the family with a constant sveepink out zhe dirt, the only phrase she said in English, a ceaseless dusting and mopping and scrubbing as if stopping the housekeeping would somehow keep the blood from pumping to her own thump-thump-thumping heart, Franny’s father was a calm man and one inclined toward speaking. This is how he was able to keep up with the insurance business, how he avoided what so many in their neighborhood could not, factory work. He managed to convince people how much they needed insurance to protect their families. Even the concept of insurance was a foreign one: Why pay for a nonexistent malady only to put a hex on the entire family? Frances would come in before bed in the evenings, when the men in the neighborhood sat at the Verdonik kitchen table fingering the edges of the stained oilcloth as Rose looked on, scowling. Her father explained that they were not paying for nothing but investing in everything: Insurance, see? A blessing not a curse. You mustn’t let your payments lapse, he told them.

  He was a fool not to have been more careful for his own family. But Abraham’s carelessness was the result of a profound belief that they—the Verdoniks of Williamsburg—were at the exact beginning of things. “Frances”—he would always try to speak to his daughter in English—“in America, no end in sight. Only zhe beginnings here.” Whereas Rose, with her inveterate pessimism, had given up on learning English—Who cares? I’ll be gone soon, she’d say in Yiddish—Abraham took up the language of his new world with zeal. And he passed this on to Frances.

  Late at night, when talk of business or politics was through, Abraham would sit at the edge of his younger daughter’s bed and tell her stories. These were the moments he spoke to her in Yiddish, and these stories always held hidden morals: “Once there was a rabbi, the leader of a village that was bordered by a people who hated them. One day their leader invited him over to work out their differences. He served ham! What did the rabbi do?” The moral was always in English: “He ate zhe ham!” Abraham told her. “To save his people he ate zhe ham, you see, my Franny-goil?”

  Her father’s gravelly voice juxtaposed with the sound of her mother in the kitchen scrubbing the roasting pan with steel wool always brought Frances to a peaceful sleep.

  Had it been Frances who had fled the neighborhood with a gangster who promised her diamonds and real estate, Abraham’s heart might have fallen through his body on the spot. But it was Pauline who had gone, so he simply took to his bed, and it was Frances, now his only daughter, who sat at her father’s bedside. She tried to coax him upright while Rose fluttered around the room, picking up knickknacks and placing them back down again.

  “Please, Mama,” Frances would implore, grabbing at her arm. “Come sit with us.”

  But Rose would not give in. She would snap her arm back as if she feared it would be taken, and, were it loosed from its socket, her entire limb left in the incapable hands of her daughter, who would clean up this mess then?

  Three months after Pauline left home, after she and the Terrier were married in a civil ceremony at City Hall, attended only by Maxie Greenberg, Waxey Gordon, and Rothstein himself, the couple moved up to Westchester.

  What was Westchester like? Frances wondered.

  She was desperate to know how her sister was living. Frances knew only this room. And lying alone in bed, Frances still found herself waiting for Pauline to come home from a night out. Not only could she not picture what her sister’s life without her was like but there was no evidence of her now, no sme
ll to signal where she had been and that, finally, she was back.

  If her parents had known that Frances was going to see her sister one sunny day in May 1925, on the train to Westchester from Grand Central Terminal, who knows what they would have done. Frances did not tell them where she was going, or that she was heading anywhere at all; she simply kissed her oblivious father on his clammy forehead and tapped her frenzied mother, who was cleaning out the cupboards for the third time that week, on the shoulder as she slipped out the door early that morning.

  Frances was sixteen years old and had been neither in such a magnificent building as Grand Central Terminal nor on a train. The whole building was flooded with light, and when Frances looked up, she saw the gilded constellations of the zodiac twinkling on the ceilings. Hope, she thought.

  How romantic, she thought as her train pulled away from Manhattan. At first it was frightening, and then the sensation of relief came over her. It was the very reverse of the moment they’d arrived, the city gleaming in the distance, the way it looked as if it was rising out of the water. For the first time, it felt to Frances, that a girl could make choices. That perhaps she could—perhaps she could go wherever she’d liked. She could return or she could keep going north and north, to Canada, where she’d heard the moose come and eat right out of your hand. Frances had never seen a moose. Or she could get on a different train, one heading west, the one that she read in the papers the Terrier’s mobster friends rode out to try to expand their business into California. In ten days she could be there—in California! Frances watched the trees whip by and imagined Hollywood, a place filled with movie stars, and bright lights, and palm trees, and beyond that city, desert, miles and miles of endless open space. What might that be like?