“Casco Bay,” Esther said. It was as if she was now breathing for the first time since she’d left Portland. “Casco Bay.”
Joseph watched the sky turning to twilight, a crescent moon rising. It was so beautiful—clean and cold and pure—that Joe promised her then and there that someday he would take her back there to live. “But not now, Esther,” he said as he tried to turn the car around to head home to her mother.
Esther became suddenly enraged. “Not now? Why not now!”
“Calm down,” Joseph said. Sometimes his wife’s rush to anger startled him, but he had always found a way to kid her out of it. Even just placing his hand high on her thigh, heated from her fleeting rage, signaled her to relax a moment and put what had happened into context. Frankly, Joseph could think of a million reasons why not, but strangely what came to mind was a joke his father always told him.
There was a Mr. Cohen, Herbert Brodsky always began, who was trying to run a store in an Irish Catholic neighborhood. He wasn’t doing much business—all the Irish Catholics were getting all the customers. So, figuring he had to do something to change things, he went to the judge. Cohen says, “Judge, I want to change my name to Kelly.” When the judge asks him why, Mr. Cohen tells him his story and how he feels it will help his business. So the judge allows him to change his name. Not a year later, the fellow comes back and the judge asks him if he wants to change his name again. Mr. Kelly says, “Yes, I do.” “You were Cohen, now you’re Kelly and now you want to change it again,” the judge says to him. “That’s right,” Kelly says. “Well, what would you like to change it to now?” asks the judge. The fellow tells him he would like his new name to be Flaherty. “And why on earth do you want to change it from Kelly to Flaherty?” asks the judge. “How is that going to help you?” “Here’s how,” says the fellow. “You know people come in and they ask me my name and I tell them it’s Kelly. So the first thing they say to me is, Well, what was it before you changed it?”
The joke used to infuriate Solomon. You think no matter what we’re just Jews? he’d scream at his father. No matter what? You’ve got it all wrong, he’d say, stomping out of the kitchen.
But Joseph always considered this less a joke and more a cautionary tale: See what happens when you try to move away from where you come from? You lose your good name. Just like when we came over. It will be so horrible, you will lose your self twice.
His wife was from here, but Joseph was not. He embraced the diverse Boston neighborhood he now lived in, but he considered Maine a country of sameness. Doing business among strangers. This was what he did now, yes, but he moved around. He was always free to go, and he did not rely on people coming to him. He imagined them all, tall and white and fleshy in their wool caps, and, before they gave him their filthy laundry, they’d take one look at his face and ask him his name.
“Because it’s not the time,” Joseph said. “You’ve got to calm down,” he told his wife again.
“Calm down?” Esther slammed her hand against her head and looked out the window. “Calm down he says,” she said to no one.
Joseph was trying to get the large car out of the small box he had somehow parked in during the excitement of watching the sun go down with his wife. In his frustration, he nearly backed up into the only other vehicle on the street.
“Joe,” Esther screamed. “Watch where you’re going!”
Joseph took a deep breath. He considered himself a patient man, and yet, right now, his patience was slipping away. He visualized a stream of water swirling down a drain. He was turning around to go back to his mother-in-law’s house, where he would be forced to listen to her berate Esther for marrying down. A black life you’ll have, Sylvia would tell her daughter, as if he weren’t sitting right there, holding Esther’s hand. A life of wanting more and more and more, Esther’s mother would tell her. That’s what you will have.
“Esther, I spend my life in zhis automobile. I know how to drive it,” Joseph said. “Will you please just shut up?” he said, avoiding the other vehicle just in the nick of time.
“Huuuh?” Esther sucked in her breath. Her eyes went wide, wild with anger. And then she shut them, crossed her arms, and pointed her chin to the sky.
Joseph tried to turn the car out of the awkward space. He reversed it a little and then jerked it forward. Sweating into the crown of his hat, he turned to look behind him, then down at the gearshift.
He reversed slowly, looking into the rearview mirror. Out of the corner of his eye he could see his wife smirking as she turned around to watch his progress.
Suddenly the back of the car slammed into a tree, and Joseph and Esther were pitched forward.
“Oh my goodness!” Joseph said. He turned to his wife. “Are you okay? That must have been in my blind spot.”
“Musta been,” Esther said. “I’m fine,” she told him.
“Thank goodness,” he said, breathing.
“I saw it coming,” Esther told him, shrugging her shoulders.
Joseph clenched his jaw and looked straight ahead, his knuckles white as he gripped the steering wheel. “Well, vhy on earth didn’t you say something zhen?”
Esther turned to her husband, her arms still crossed over her chest. “I would have, darling, but you told me to shut up.”
Joseph stared at her blankly for a moment and then got out of the car—now backed halfway onto the grass—to assess the damage.
Esther leaned out the window as he leaned over the left side of the automobile. “I know you spend your life in cars, Joe, believe me, but I gotta tell you, you’ve always been a dreadful driver.”
Though Joseph had promised Esther he would get her back to Portland one day, he imagined the town in winter, bleak as the North Pole but for the evergreens popping up out of a thick blanket of white, people barely speaking as they passed in the streets, bundled with so much clothing they could hardly wave hello. He imagined a stillness that he wanted to covet for its tranquillity but that he knew would feel closer to death than to calm.
Joseph knew he could make something of his own, just as Stoddard had. This was when he began to work to find a cleaning product that was miscible in both oil and water. Though he was not a businessman, Joseph knew there was an opening in the marketplace, a space like a doorway he was sure he could walk through and fill with his small stature. But it would take work and experimenting and documenting and formulating and mixing, and this was what Joseph set out to do.
Joseph told Esther about Solomon only once, and this admission had been brought on by liquor, something he rarely indulged in. But Esther’s asking to take money from his brother made him remember Solomon again. He remembered looking at the night sky through Solomon’s telescope. That had been incredible—looking out into the black of what felt like another universe entirely. And then their tiny kitchen, Shabbos at their crooked little table. Though Joseph often thought of his brother, on the surface he remembered him more as the villain he’d edited from a wicked fairy tale that was life growing up in Brooklyn.
How could his brother turn his back on this?
Though Joseph willed himself not to think of it, simply not let it pass into his thoughts, he couldn’t help himself. For the first time, he understood his brother. Who knew it would be so hard to get so little in life? Why hadn’t his father told him that on the stoop as he told his sons the future was theirs? Why not cut corners? Joseph thought now. Who really sees anyway?
God sees. But also I do, thought Joseph. He remembered his father’s spectacles, fogged from the steam of his mother’s cooking, four pots boiling on that tiny black stove. It’s just knowing, thought Joseph, not seeing.
All those weeks he spent on the road away from Esther, he’d still make time some Friday nights to get down to Brooklyn when he had a very southern route mapped out for him. When he drove over the Williamsburg Bridge to his parents’, it was always the same: he wished he had something to show for himself. And he dreaded the flat view from the bridge, no skyline, as he he
aded into bleakness. Pulling onto the block, kids playing stickball in the street the way he had so many years before, depressed him. Getting out of his car and looking up to see Frances Verdonik sitting on the stoop—did she ever leave that exact spot?—also depressed him. Was she waiting for her sister to come home? The only way Pauline was coming back was in a coffin, thought Joseph, scolding himself for thinking it at the exact moment the thought came into his head.
What was this girl waiting for? Frances always looked like she was about to burst into tears.
Hello, Frances. Joseph would always tip his hat to her. What else could he do? Sometimes he would bring her a bar of soap tied up with string like a present. For your mommy, okay? he’d say.
Joseph wished that he could be the good son, that he had the means his brother had to give his parents what they deserved. He wanted to sit at his mother’s table, her white tablecloth pressed and cleaned from the week before. He wanted to bow his head as he had on so many Friday nights in his youth, recite the brachot, watch his mother fill his plate with tsimes.
But his father’s way, the world of that Friday table, that no longer made sense to Joseph. Nothing made sense to him, he realized nights alone on the road, only your thoughts to drive you half mad. He thought of the universe on those nights. He watched the universe in the stars. He listened to it on the radio. The very fact that radio existed, Joseph thought, was more fantasy than God. Mystical, perhaps, occult forces he knew nothing about. Not God. What had happened with his brother, it was not personal. What had happened in Russia, this was not personal either. God is not personal. It is the nature of the universe. It is humans. What’s going on here, on South Fifth Street—Pauline’s little sister about to weep on the front stoop; his mother, her hands in her lap as she sits at the table covered by that clean tablecloth waiting for her son to come home so she can tell him: my beautiful boy, so good, my only son. This was the image that nearly broke him—here on the open road in the middle of this black night, Esther rubbing lemons on her elbows and knees before bed, that was God.
It didn’t make sense to him anymore, this. His father’s many rituals. The morning prayer. How could he betray his father and tell him that he didn’t want to pray and tefillin anymore? Why, Joseph thought, do I have to wear a prayer shawl to show that I am thinking of God under my underwear? Perhaps he was more like his brother than he’d thought.
Joseph remembered when he and Solomon sat in the living room playing marbles and watching their father put on his phylacteries, those little square boxes he placed on his head and under his left arm. When he began to shake back and forth, rocking and rocking, Solomon turned to Joseph and said, “He’s all charged up with electricity! Look! It’s making him move!”
Joseph laughed and then stopped himself. He had not wanted his father to hear him.
But visiting his parents as an adult, he felt the same way about it. What is it exactly? Joseph wondered. It seemed artificial to him, external. Wasn’t it enough to have God in his heart?
It was not enough. In how many ways could a person be chosen? Chosen, Joseph began to think, was something else, a mark perhaps. Like what happened on his honeymoon. He and Esther had gone to the Laurentian Mountains, just outside Montreal. He had known that there was anti-Semitism in the area and that there were certain policies operating in the hotels. Mostly to avoid embarrassment, Joseph wrote to many hotels and resorts, letting them know he and his wife were Jews and inquiring about their policy regarding this undeniable fact, as they had not wanted their honeymoon ruined by someone telling them they were not wanted. The hotel they finally picked had said nothing about it. They were welcome and they went there, and stayed for an entire week, swimming and playing tennis, walking in the woods, making love before dinner, and listening to the band play each night beneath the stars. They’d played Irving Berlin’s “Blue Skies” every evening, and time after time Joseph held Esther close to him and had confused her heartbeat with his own.
The first night had been quite funny, actually. Esther all dressed up in her special wedding lingerie. She had gone to the bathroom down the hall in these ridiculous satin slippers and without a robe, and when she got out of the toilet, she had no idea which was their room. Esther had stopped at nearly every door: “Joseph?” she had whispered, scratching like a cat on the doors along the hallway. “Joe?”
Joseph had heard her when she got two doors down from their room, and he had thought it so funny, he’d almost let Esther come all the way down the corridor to him. But instead he’d opened the door and, hands on his hips, waited for his new wife to turn and come toward the sliver of light.
“Hello, my darling,” he’d said, pulling her inside.
“Boy, am I ever glad to see you,” she’d said, giggling into his arms.
They had planned to leave on Labor Day, and so the Saturday night before the end of their trip, Joseph went down to pay the bill. Suddenly, in front of him there was a sign that said “Christian clientele only.” Joseph had never seen the sign before and, confused, he went back upstairs to ask Esther if she had seen it.
“No, Joe,” she said, placing the book she was reading on her chest. “I haven’t seen any such sign.”
“You’re sure?” he asked again.
“Positive,” Esther said.
He went down to straighten it out. In the lobby, he asked for the manager. When the man came out of his back office, Joseph told him what had happened.
“You know zhat I’m a Jew, don’t you?” Joseph asked.
“Of course I know that,” the manager said.
“Well, it seems my vife and I are not velcome here,” Joseph said. He pointed to the sign.
The manager reddened. He turned to the desk clerk and yelled, “Take that sign down immediately!”
When Joseph asked why they had the sign in the first place, the manager told him that Jews were welcome in the summer, but there was a new policy that come Labor Day—high season because of the fall foliage and the apple picking—the clientele did not want Jews around. “The sign is down now,” the manager said, nodding toward the desk clerk. “It will be fine.”
“Zhis does not go on and off like a spigot!” Joseph said.
“I apologize,” the manager said. “The sign went up two days early.”
Joseph and Esther went to the dance that night, and they danced the way they had on all the other nights. When “Blue Skies” played then, though, Joseph felt something crawl into his throat and attach itself there. As he held Esther, who had drunk quite a bit of champagne, he took in the all-over smell of her, wondering would that lump ever leave him.
At the end of the evening, they returned to the room, and as soon as they’d opened the door, the smell of roses overcame them. Esther squealed and clapped her hands to see that the room was filled with enormous pink roses. They were on the dresser, on the nightstand, on the writing table, as well as thrown across the bed.
“How beautiful!” Esther cried. She twirled around the room. She took a stem and placed it delicately behind her ear. “It’s so romantic, Joe!”
“It sure isn’t,” he said. “Let’s pack.”
“Come on,” Esther said. She placed one rose between her teeth and went pawing at Joseph, her left foot kicking the ground like that of a filly.
“I’m sorry, but ve are leaving tonight!” he said. Still dressed in his evening clothes, Esther nursing a torn lip from the rose stem she had clamped between her teeth without realizing it had thorns, Joseph drove them south into the black night, the Lucky Strike Orchestra coming through on the radio—“While you listen to Weber and Fields, or sit out a dance, we suggest you reach for a Lucky, always kind to your throat. Now we open with ‘Dip Your Brush in the Sunshine’”—just as they hit Boston.
Joseph couldn’t bring himself to tell his father of this experience. Somehow it was easy, as a kid, to explain the fights he and Solomon got into with the Irish and the Italians who were behind every corner, waiting to attack, waiting to
tell the Brodsky brothers, We are better than you. Joseph knew this experience informed the decisions his brother had made that had left a hole in his family where Solomon once had been physically, and also a hole of silence where once there had been stories and memories and talk of the future. So much could never be spoken between these two generations; it was unnatural, thought Joseph, never to say a word about it.
But he knew that this injustice would hurt Herbert as the world always seemed to hurt him, as his elder son had. It was important for Joseph to give his father the gift that his father was so sure he had given him: this country. Goldene medina! How could Joseph look his father in the eye and tell him, No, Father, what we have here is a fool’s paradise?
Always, leaving his parents’ home, it was the same. He had known what his father had not wanted for him: don’t be a bad boy, don’t turn away from your family, don’t stand on the corner that way like the bad boys, don’t turn your back on God like all bad boys are wont to do. But what had his father wanted him to be?
“But my dreams,” Herbert had said when Solomon told him he was leaving. “What about my dreams?” his father had pleaded. “And my dreams?” Solomon had screamed at his father. “What about my dreams?”
Silence.
Joseph had looked up from his studies at the unusual sound and seen his father’s desperate face. Silence is the sound the dashing of my father’s dreams makes, Joseph had thought then.
Driving back up to Boston, where his wife—a woman he would live every day unable to believe she had actually chosen him—waited for him to come home, Joseph wondered as he had when he was a boy in his father’s loud house: Is this strange silence the sound of the dashing of my own dreams?
Chapter 6
Irrevocability:
Seymour Bloom, 1928
SEYMOUR BLOOM WAS MAKING his own sales calls in Westchester, New York, which was how he stumbled into the Terrier’s lair. Three years after Frances had stood in the library and watched her sister crack the bindings of each new book, Seymour Bloom stepped through the golden gates, past the oasis with its trickling waterfall and tropical grasses, and, beneath the imported palms and golden moldings, he tried to sell Pauline a set of encyclopedias.
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