If Pauline doesn’t want to be Miss America, well, maybe it could be me, Frances thought, scratching her chin and looking out the train window. Maybe I could be famous. She had to laugh at herself. Miss America. It will never be me, she thought, looking at her face superimposed over the changing landscape. Never.
When Frances arrived in Westchester, she learned that it looked a lot like ancient Egypt. Terrier, who had an obsession with Egypt—this came from the time he was refused entry into the country—had turned the place in Rye, New York, into an Egyptian lair, complete with golden gates flanked by two replicas of the Sphinx.
“I’ll tell you why I built the place, Fran,” the Terrier said to his new sister-in-law when he went to meet her at the station in his yellow Duesenberg. “Because if I can’t go to Egypt, then Egypt sure as hell can come to me.”
When they arrived at the estate, the Terrier opened the door for Frances. She had been so bowled over by the luxurious automobile, the fine leather seats, and the shiny mirrors and handles that she hadn’t even noticed their arrival until the Terrier swung out his short little arm. Walking toward the house, the Terrier looked back proudly at his yellow Model A.
“Eighty-seven horsepower, baby,” he said to Frances as he turned toward the house. “That’s an eight-cylinder engine.” The Terrier made the gesture of a gun with his right hand.
“It’s nice, Sol,” Frances said.
“Nice!” he said, laughing. “Nice, she says.”
“Land!” he told her. “My land! You know, when we were kids on South Fifth, all I could see out of my window was walls. Walls, walls, walls. My father spent his life looking out onto an airshaft. Like animals we lived. Now look.” He took a huge gulp of air. “If my father wasn’t so damn moral, he’d be proud,” he said. “Don’t you think he’s proud in his own way, Franny-goil?”
Frances pictured Herbert dragging himself up the stoop as if it didn’t matter if he ever went inside his house again. “I think he is,” she said.
“And my brother too,” he said. “But he won’t come up here. Not a chance.”
Frances was silent, but she understood Joseph. They had both been left to clean up the messes of their selfish older siblings. She wondered, for a moment, why she had come and if she shouldn’t just turn around and head back to Brooklyn. Frances thought of the ceiling at Grand Central, the whole universe painted on a golden ceiling.
They walked through the door and into the foyer. Despite the fountain spewing water out of the mouth of a mummified king and the sand, brought in from the Maine coast, the molding stenciled in golden foil, hieroglyphics circling the room, the room still smelled of new paint.
“You know, in ancient Egypt it was customary to weigh the heart of the dead. If the Jews did that, everyone would one day see how it’s a decent enough life I’m leading. And I have a big, good heart.” The Terrier thumped his chest. “Don’t you think?” Beads of sweat were collecting on his nose and his fleshy cheeks.
“Of course,” Frances said. She smiled at the Terrier, remembering him just last year below her window, hat in his hands. How could this be the same man who ghosted through town heading toward evil?
Then Pauline walked into the foyer. She looked like an entirely new girl, stunning with a short, soft, bobbed haircut, dangling diamond earrings just peeking out from beneath her thick, dark hair. She wore a long satin gown, and it was barely eleven o’clock. “Frances,” she said quietly. She went to hug her sister tentatively.
All the small things her father had given Pauline to make her look more beautiful now seemed ridiculous. A compact? Rayon stockings? These were tawdry and small and useless to her sister.
Frances hugged Pauline back and felt the way a world already hung between them. She had shared a bed with her sister all her life, and now, pressed to her for the first time in months, her sister’s body was the structure of a stranger. When she pulled away, Frances could see her sister’s face looked harder, her distinct features chiseled, the face now of a woman.
“Hello,” Frances said. “Am I invited to the party?” she asked, fingering the heavy salmon-colored cloth of the gown.
Pauline laughed. “Darling,” she said, “this is my nightgown.”
Frances looked up at the symbols that lined the moldings like a painted trellis. “What does that mean?” she asked.
Pauline scoffed at her. “What difference does it make?” she said.
“It means Home Sweet Home!” the Terrier said. “In ancient Egyptian.”
“I don’t think it does,” said Pauline.
“When you asked the designer, over and over again, that’s what he told you,” the Terrier said. “‘I want to know what it means!’ she told him over and over. Now she doesn’t believe him. Ridiculous. Home Sweet Home it means. It means Pauline will always be waiting here for me.” The Terrier tapped her bottom, which rippled beneath the satin.
Pauline shuffled away, and the Terrier turned to Frances. “You’ve got to see the library, kid,” he said.
King Tutankhamen’s tomb had been discovered three years previously, and as much as the Terrier wanted to re-create that feel, also, he told Frances, he wanted his house to have the air of intelligence. He walked through the parlor, which was set up to look like the inside of a tomb but with more light, the Terrier explained, and into an enormous library. It was wooded and dark and calming. Frances went over to the enormous leather seats that were perched along a polished mahogany table.
“You like?” the Terrier asked. “Feel them! Come on, feel them! Soft as a baby’s bottom.”
Frances ran her hands over the supple leather and looked up at the walls, lined with books.
“Look here, kid, I got the Dickens, the Fielding, the Henry James.” The Terrier went around the room reading names from the leather-bound spines. “Proust,” he said.
Frances thought of her father with his wire spectacles reading and rereading those old, yellow books at the greasy kitchen table before he took to his bed, and she tried to shake off the extreme weight of that memory.
Pauline sauntered into the room. “But how many have you read, Terry?” she asked her husband. She put her hands on her hips. “Huh?”
The Terrier looked up, squinting, his mouth, which was normally quite large, drawn up into a horrible scowl. “You can’t talk to me like that!” he said. “I don’t care who you are!” he said. And then he turned back to Frances. “Look here, doll, those are real books with honest-to-God pages.”
Pauline rolled her eyes.
Frances nodded and took down a volume of T. S. Eliot, the board thick and crass, covered in new leather, the binding not yet broken. She flipped an edition of Richardson from the shelf and then a Charlotte Brontë, the pages not yet cut. Each book she took down was as brand-new as the one before. “They’re beautiful,” she said to them both. Again she remembered her father, the days he sat up straight and slammed a book closed to shock Rose into ceasing to clean.
Frances rubbed her arms.
“Cold?” The Terrier asked her.
Frances nodded.
“Let’s go back into the desert then!” he said, putting his hand at the small of Frances’s back to guide her out of the room and into the sand-filled foyer.
Frances could stay only a few hours, because she had to return before her parents suspected she had gone to see her sister. After lying on Pauline’s massive four-poster bed, her legs scissoring the air as Pauline showed her gown after gown, pearl after diamond, fur coat after mink stole, Frances became restless. She began to miss the little flat she shared with her unhappy parents, next to her unhappy neighbors, on an unhappy and yet somehow hopeful street. Anger, the kind that she had experienced when she took down that chopped liver swan only a little over a year ago, came over her. It was not jealousy, Frances was sure of this. Though she would have liked a dress or two, where on earth would she wear it? It was just anger. Anger that her sister had abandoned her for this life. This life with the Terrier, a life of
things. Was having things worth giving up everything? Your family? Was having things better than winning the Miss America contest? Better than fame? Even Franny could see her sister was going now for infamy.
Frances strolled the grounds of the estate on her own, walking all the way down to the man-made river, “the Nile,” that the Terrier had had put in and maintained with a state-of-the-art irrigation system. After sitting on its rather small bank, Frances went back to the house to get the Terrier to take her to the train, and to say good-bye to her sister.
“I’ll drive you back, kid,” he said when she found him in the kitchen, eating sturgeon with his fingers, straight out of the waxed deli paper. “Want some?” He held out the package to her.
Franny shook her head and panicked. If she came back with the Terrier, the whole neighborhood would know exactly where she’d been. And they’d have some things to say about where she was headed as well. It would make everything worse. The neighbors would become convinced that the Verdoniks were in cahoots with their daughter, that they stood behind every lousy decision she’d made.
“But I love the train,” Frances said meekly.
The Terrier threw the sturgeon back into the icebox without even folding the paper over the fish. “Nah. You don’t. You love the car, doll! I have some business in Brooklyn anyway,” he said.
Was he testing her? Did he know that she didn’t want to be seen with him? Frances had no idea. She thought of the prospect of not having to pay the train fare back into town. There she went, just like her sister. Frances pulled at her single whisker as she deliberated about what to do.
“Okay,” she said. “If it’s not too much trouble.”
“Off we go!” he said.
Frances wandered the house looking for her sister to say good-bye, and she found her in the library. Pauline stood in her nightgown on the ladder that slid across the walls so one could reach any book one wanted. Pauline must not have heard the soft padding of Frances’s entry, because Frances watched her open a book with a grand and violent gesture that sounded like a bone cracking and then replace it on the wall. Frances watched her sister do this with three more books, imagining that each was a bone breaking, resetting, and settling back into its proper place in the skeletal system.
“Pauline,” Frances said quietly. “I’m leaving now.”
Pauline jerked around at the sound of her sister’s voice. Tears ran down her lovely face. “Bye,” she said. She handed Frances the book she was holding. It had a hairline fracture along the spine, as delicate as a spider’s thread.
“What are you doing?” Frances asked. Had she gone mad, the way everyone said about Mrs. Goldstein, who one day took all her furniture out of her house and lay on her couch on the corner of South Fifth Street until some mothers sent their sons to help her back inside? Perhaps Pauline had been hypnotized, some kind of mobster black magic, which must have been how the Terrier had gotten her up here to begin with.
“If you got the books,” she said, “might as well look like you’ve read them.” Pauline shrugged and took the book back from her sister. Frances nodded.
It would finish her father off in earnest to hear such things, Frances thought. Again anger rose in her, and she resisted the impulse to knock her sister off her ladder and rip her face—the mask she wore, those earrings, the straight black hair—just tear this from her face and watch her sister scream.
“Sol? I’m ready to leave!” Frances yelled into the tomb of the living room as she turned to walk away without so much as kissing her sister good-bye.
Chapter 5
Electricity:
Joseph Brodsky, 1931
THE FIRST FEW YEARS of their marriage were difficult times for Joe and Esther. Their love was bountiful enough; it was just the money that was on the scarce side, despite his brother’s wealth. Joseph wanted nothing that came printed with the Mob’s greasy—stains not water soluble—fingers. Sometimes he wondered whether he was not just cleaning up behind his brother. Joseph imagined his life as if it was an actual cloth, swiping through layers of soot and dirt in an attempt to reveal the glorious, shining metal beneath. He knew he had to build his own fortune, in his own manner, in his own time.
Though Joseph liked being his parents’ only son, and though he believed in a pure life of good works, at the bottom of it all, it was really Esther and the prospect of children that kept him from going into business with the Terrier.
“Don’t even mention his name to me!” Joseph would scream at Esther when she asked if they could just this once take a loan from Solomon.
Even on his most demoralized days, he would not consider it. Joseph raised his voice only when it came to talk of his brother.
“But, Joe,” Esther would say softly. “He’s your brother!” She’d tear through the silver wrapper of the Hershey’s bar with her teeth. Ever since she’d been pregnant, she couldn’t get enough of them.
“I don’t have a brother!” Joseph would scream back, kneeling to pick up the bits of foil his wife had spit on the floor. “You know, Esther, you’re going to get fat!” he’d tell her, rolling the foil into a ball between his fingers.
“I know,” she’d say, laughing, taking it from him to throw away. “You’ll still love me, right, Joe?” She would go to give him a kiss on the lips but hit his nose instead.
“Correct,” said Joseph. “But it’s bad for your health, you know, and I’d like to keep you around for a vhile.”
How had his life turned out this way? That feeling he had when he came back with nothing. Or he should say, when he came back with everything. Nothing sold. How could this be? Joseph had known salesmen who really lived the high life. His old friend from the neighborhood Bernie Rottenberg—light fixtures, bulbs, he sold—he ate at all the fancy-schmancy places, wined and dined his clients on those huge boats on the Long Island Sound. Perhaps when he decided not to go into business with his brother, Joseph had thought, There is still the possibility for grandeur. As his friend had. Bernie sold light. There was power in looking out at the skyline of a city at twilight and saying, “Let there be light!” It was a little bit like playing God, Joseph thought now. Would that have soothed his mother or worried her?
His mother had always told him: God is in the smallest things. Cleanliness is next to godliness, yes, he’d thought, watching the buildings light up at night, but illuminating the city was sure to be the work of God. He was in the light. God was not in the corked glass bottles and bars of fat and clay Joseph carried with him in his two leather valises.
The Terrier was making more dough racketeering than anyone from South Fifth Street had ever dreamed possible. But at what price, all this money? Joseph had heard from his mother that Mendel Shulz (Ethel’s husband, she’d said, incredulous when Joseph had said, Who?) had seen Solomon on Kent Street, by the water, chasing after some poor fellow. Solomon had jumped out of a car with another hoodlum and thrown this poor kid up against a building, punched him in the head and in the stomach, and, when he’d keeled over, Solomon and his buddy had kicked him. Then they hopped in the car and drove off, left that guy just bleeding on the street. “Like an animal!” Selma had said to Joseph, and he had not been sure if she’d meant his brother or his brother’s victim.
Joseph didn’t ask if that man was still alive. That was the last time Selma Brodsky would discuss her elder son.
He tried not to think about the kind of violence his brother involved himself in, orchestrated even, as he lugged bottles of his own—instead of liquor, it was jars of Procter & Gamble soap flakes, and bars of Ivory—all across southern New England. Though the flakes performed poorly in hard water, leaving a ring in the washing machine, dulling colors, and turning whites gray, Joseph had to find an effective way to convince the industries he sold to, and the homes he stopped in along the way, that Procter & Gamble was the brand to buy.
“The soap that floats!” he’d tell them, holding up a clean, white bar of Ivory. No matter what, he loved the smell of that soap, each a
nd every time he took a sample out for show.
“That’s a lovely dress you have on, Mrs., Mrs., what is your name, miss?”
Selling was not his calling. And Joseph knew because of this he would be fired soon. He knew he needed to find something that would make him money. Esther had suggested he start his own dry-cleaning business. Since that lucky man Stoddard had found the petroleum solvent that made dry cleaning a safe profession, Esther was insistent on it.
“You’ll be home,” she said. “No more nights on the road. We can go to Maine.” Esther put her hand over her heart.
She had it all figured out: The dry cleaner was going to be on the corner of Baxter Boulevard and Franklin Street, and that meant that she was going to live just down the block from where Joseph worked, not far from the street where she’d grown up. Though now it’s an old folks’ home, she’d told Joseph, as if his finding this out would somehow change his plans. Can you believe it? And they expanded the place, built right over where I buried my appendix when I was a little girl. I had it in a glass jar and I buried it and now the old folks’ home is built right on top of it.
“Can you imagine?” Esther had said.
Joseph could not imagine one of his wife’s internal organs covered by an old-age home, it was true. It gave him the creeps that part of her was already buried. He had to admit, though, that the idea of customers coming to him was appealing. From the moment they walked in the door, a sale completed. Still, he refused. In the end, Joseph felt he could make more money on the road in his Chevrolet, the windshield open, the breeze in his hair, thoughts of all the great things the future would bring clanking around his brain like the bottles on the backseat.
“Maine?” Joseph said. He couldn’t imagine what it would be like to live so far north. He had been there only in the summertime, which he had to admit was breathtaking. One evening he and Esther escaped her mother and went to Amato’s for Italian sandwiches. Upon seeing the sun setting from a distance, they had pulled onto a dirt road, driving until they reached water.
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