Golden Country

by Jennifer Gilmore

  Frances spent some time examining the different sweets. Just the sight of the gummed fruits, crescents of green and orange and yellow dusted with sugar, the long strands of bright red licorice tied up in knots, the sunny butterscotches and caramels, teased her aching taste buds. She longed for an egg cream: for that first mouthful of chocolate, followed by the metallic taste of seltzer that, she thought now, might be the taste her father mistook for death. Frances had not known how much she craved sweetness until her mouth watered at all that was spread out before her.

  While she moved through the store, a young man came in and sat across from the old woman.

  “What should I say?” he asked in Yiddish, placing a coin on the table. He was a handsome man with large hands that he ran through his thick, dark hair.

  The woman responded in a much quicker Yiddish. “I give you the story,” she said, “and it costs you more.” She nodded her head toward the coin.

  He shook his head. “You are a mean woman, Etta,” he told her.

  She shrugged her shoulders. She wore a kerchief and looked a bit like a gypsy, Frances thought. “Then get someone else to write your letters, Herschel,” she said. She laughed—very few teeth.

  “Calm down. Calm down,” he said. “Just tell my wife that I am saving and I will send for her very soon. Can you tell her that? That I am saving and saving and saving, that all I do is work and think of her arrival with my son.”

  “Of course,” Etta said. “This is America, Herschel. You say what you like, you get what you pay for. I won’t write how I seen you walking the streets with Maimie Schmidt, arm in arm, Herschel. What do I care?”

  Frances scooped up a handful of Brach’s, and, taking a long, thin strand of red licorice along with the peppermints, she paid for the candy. When the man had gone, she went over to the letter writer. Though her Yiddish was a bit rusty—she insisted her parents speak English in the house—the language was still hers. Frances said, “You write letters for money?” In the Verdonik household, money was big conversation.

  The woman didn’t answer but sealed Herschel’s envelope closed and began to copy out a foreign address. She pounded a stamp on the right-hand corner.

  Frances sat down on the edge of the chair and scooted up to the table. “Do you write letters?” she asked.

  “What does it look like?” the letter writer said.

  This was a woman, cruel and efficient, like any number of old women Frances had known. “Better than the factory, huh?” she said. How many of the women in her neighborhood schlepped to Hester Street each morning to work the sewing machines?

  The woman looked up at her, annoyed. “What do you know from the factory?” she said. “Who are you anyhow?”

  This was the point in any conversation that Frances had begun to dread. Whereas once she would have said “Frances Verdonik” with pride, now everyone seemed to have heard about her sister’s marriage to a gangster. “Frances,” she said. She looked up at the walls, which were yellowing and cracked, stocked with shelves of gelt, wrapped in a shimmering gold foil. “Frances Golden,” she said. But that didn’t sound right. Too hesitant, she thought. Not only did Golden say not gold enough but it said not gold truthfully. “Frances Gold, I mean,” she said. She felt that the name alone made her sparkle, she herself wrapped up in the fancy foil.

  The woman scratched her chin. Four long hairs sprouted from it. “I don’t know any Golds,” she said.

  “We write our own letters home,” Frances said.

  The woman threw up her hands. “Why are you wasting my time then?” She waved Frances aside, and an old woman stepped out from behind.

  Frances put her hands on the table and pushed herself up. “Oh,” she said. “Sorry.”

  The woman slid into the chair. “Etta Valensky,” she said, “you write to my cousin and tell him how well I’m doing.”

  “Lie again you mean?” said Etta. “Sure. It’s a lovely life you have, Rebecca. What do I care?”

  The woman squinted at the letter writer. “Whatever it takes.”

  Etta nodded.

  “And then I want you to write to my son. In California! Tell him to come and visit his mother. Write to him to come in time for the holidays. Only you must do it in English—this boy speaks only English! He’s forgotten all the Yiddish!”

  Etta shook her head. “Only in Yiddish,” she said. “How many times do I have to tell you people? I write the letters only in Yiddish. I speak ten languages—all of them Yiddish!”

  Realizing she was staring, Frances turned to walk home and try the peppermints on her father.

  As it turned out, Abraham Verdonik had a weakness for peppermint candies. Round and swirled white and red, square and chalky green, even stretched into Christmas-style canes, the peppermint gave Abraham childlike delight. When Frances held out a piece twirled in clear cellophane, he sat up in bed and leaned against propped pillows. And while he sucked at the candy, it was as if Pauline had never left a trail of stunned grief behind her. It was as if Frances had never shown up on the block in that yellow car with the roof removed, a gangster at the wheel. In these moments, Abraham smiled and discussed what he’d read in the Forward, or something Franny had read to him previously, which at the time he had greeted with only a pallid silence.

  “Zhat Hannah Breineh,” he’d say of Yezierska’s heroine. Knock knock went the hard candy against his teeth. “So ungrateful zhat one. Zhe children move her up zhe town like she’s a real lady and she doesn’t like it!” Between his sucking and his accent, Abraham was nearly impossible to understand.

  But he was talking! Frances hadn’t known how much he would love them, how they would cover up the copper taste of death and bring him again to the happy juice of language. She hadn’t known that her reinvention had begun right there in Mr. Berkowitz’s candy store, or that the seed of an idea had been planted there. She would sell what Etta Valensky could not—English. She would be the one to write to everyone’s children. Only she wouldn’t charge extra to lie. She wouldn’t charge extra to make these parents’ lives seem like the goldene medina they were sure they were going toward when they packed up for golden—no Gold—America.

  Frances set up shop right next to Etta Valensky, who was not at all pleased until she saw the way it enhanced her own business.

  “More people will come,” said Frances, when they see that they can write to both the past and the future in one sitting.

  Etta liked the way the girl put it. Many times mothers had begged her to write to their children and she’d had to turn them away. “As long as I do all the Yiddish, you can have the English,” Etta told her.

  By the time Frances turned seventeen, lines twisted around the block like Mr. Berkowitz’s licorice. And so she continued her education, writing what the old ladies and old men who had lived in the Ukraine and Lithuania and Poland and Russia told her. What she noticed most about these people, as they slowly slid into their chairs and put their heads into their shaking hands, was their fear. They spoke to her with immediacy, as if they had been storing these stories away for safekeeping and only now was it okay to let them loose. Sometimes, as they spoke, their hands moved, like the wings of birds in flight.

  The people loved Frances; she had a way of always making her customers feel at ease. She smiled encouragingly, sometimes touching a trembling hand. And as Frances had had her share of trouble, even for such a young girl, people could sense her empathy and they were drawn to her. They had her write to many relatives, but what surprised her was how many letters she wrote to unborn children. These almost always began: You may not know me and I may be gone by the time you’ve arrived but there are some things I want to tell you…. It was interesting that, despite the bitter and sarcastic way they spoke, the old people chose to preserve mostly small, good things. They had her write about their mothers who sang them lullabies to sleep, the way a tree threw a shadow on the front of their childhood house. They told her of how a plum tasted, the quality of light in a forest clea
ring, the indescribable smell of lavender. And it was in the very smallness of these details that Frances knew these stories were true.

  The other letters went to adult children who had left Brooklyn. I know you don’t have time for your mother, these letters usually began. They went on to describe either the decaying physical condition of the person dictating or to express how much their lives had improved since their children had left them to wither away alone. No one told the truth. Those who on paper were bedridden were usually quite well, as Frances saw when they stood up and walked away from her letter-writing station. And those who showed themselves as the very portraits of good health were often racked by fits of coughing, their skin so translucent that she could see the twisting ropes of veins and arteries beneath, like maps of their troubled histories.

  All actors, Frances thought. It is our way. And then she thought again: I would like to be an actor. Here I am, she thought, the curtain breaking open. Someone else’s story, yes, but here I am to deliver it to you.

  While Frances wrote to what was about to be, Etta wrote to what already had been—the relatives waiting to come, the ones too infirm to make the journey, those who would never leave. Though many of the letters were succinct commands—come on this ship, at this time, and bring the marriage certificate—many were great, complex fantasies upholding the ideas that those who had not yet arrived were able to believe. I have a great house with many dogs, wrote Moishe Wexler, who lived in the tiny flat above the store. I eat at all the fancy restaurants, where people serve me on silver trays, and then I go out dancing all night long and only wish it were with you, wrote the emaciated Lev Cohen.

  When the letters were answered, Etta and Frances read them to their recipients. The letters from very far away, Etta’s letters, always carried bad news—the death of a father or brother, pogroms, and rumors of a nearby village being razed. But the ones in English—those from within North America’s borders—were almost always about happy occasions—brises, namings, bar mitzvahs, plans for travel.

  Frances now had access to history. Once she had written someone’s story, it seemed that she owned it in some way, that she had in fact experienced it. Can you see me now, Pauline? she’d think, imagining herself high on the hill in the city of Budapest. I am not waiting for you in that airless room, she would think as she walked across the Charles Bridge and into the city of Prague, Tyn Cathedral rising in the distance in her imagination. And so her real life, the life of a pear-shaped girl covered with hair whose beautiful sister had left home for a fairy tale to which Frances would never be invited, whose mother couldn’t stop herself from cleaning, and whose father wouldn’t get out of bed, began to fall away.

  Though Frances never told Abraham and Rose of her newfound career, it was not something she purposefully hid. How could she? Her father had only to walk down the street to see his second daughter seated at a table like a fortune-teller, a line of old-world patrons waiting for her to read their palms and predict their futures, snaking along the block. But Abraham rarely left his bedroom, let alone the apartment. And though Rose went out onto the stoop to sweep away the day’s dirt from the steps, she didn’t visit with anyone anymore. Even if the neighbors were kind enough not to speak of it, the fate of Pauline was always in their hearts. So Rose stayed away from gossip, which included a few stories about her husband, who had taken to bed with the whole neighborhood’s insurance. Had she listened only once, the gossip would have brought Rose news of this strange Gold girl who would translate a story and send it to whomever for two cents, not including postage.

  Each evening, Frances slid her money through the slot in the glass jar in the kitchen. Just the clink clink clink of the coins made her mother relax a moment on her broom, something like a smile dimly lighting her face. Perhaps she believed the cash was sent to her from Pauline, whom Abraham refused to see or speak to. Rose was in no position to turn down money, and so she never asked.

  Sitting in a chair beside her father’s bed clutching the peppermints Mrs. Berkowitz gave her for free each day—the least she could do for all the business the young woman brought to the store—Frances had a wealth of stories to tell. Without a book nestled in her lap, without the aid of the tiny lamp on his bedside table, Frances now told her father stories about gypsies and cafés, about trains and travels. And she told them with such authority—she had written them down, after all—that Abraham never questioned her sources. Perhaps he thought it had been he who had told his younger girl these tales, even though they took place in mountains he had never climbed, along rivers he had never crossed, in cities with cafés where he had never even sipped a coffee. If the stories set in Hungary and Lithuania perplexed Abraham, he never revealed it. He simply rested back on his pillows, pleased with himself for his one good offspring. Perhaps for a fleeting moment he thought, I was wrong to put everything into Pauline. Perhaps he thought, A girl who is smart, who can tell a story, she is more helpful to her family, to the world, than a girl with a pretty face riding by on a float. This kind of girl is a waste. She will always be waving good-bye.

  Two years after her sister ran off, Frances overheard the whispers on the street that Pauline had given birth to a son, but she did not go see her sister or her new nephew. She remembered their dreams, which had always been Pauline’s dreams. Pauline would be the beauty queen. Pauline with the lovely ribbons spilling from her hair. Why was Frances the one who was stout as a teapot and forced to eat limp cabbage and potatoes when her sister was dining in high style? Why did Frances have to work so hard, become someone else, to keep her family going? Franny’s resentment had grown large, her anger at being the one left behind building and building until it became its own permanent structure. Soon her anger became a place: it had a roof, and windows, and an enormous wooden door that she could lock and slam shut, put the key in her dress pocket, and walk away.

  In the winter of 1928, just as the copper taste in his mouth seemed to have been completely neutralized by peppermints, Abraham Verdonik died in his sleep.

  With his body growing cold in their bed, Rose scrubbed the bathroom tiles and all the exposed bathroom surfaces until she could see her own reflection in them. Frances watched her bending down to see her warped face in the gleaming tiles. And so it was Frances who had to make the funeral arrangements.

  But Frances also needed a place to put her heartache, and she shocked herself with the way she needed ritual. What had she known from tradition? When she placed the towels on the stoop with a pitcher of water, as Reb Bender had instructed, Rose screamed, “What are you doink?”

  “People need to wash off from the grave!” Frances told her. “They can’t bring graveyard dirt into our home!” Just the thought of the curse made her shiver.

  This idea of dirt also troubled Rose, but still she thumped her forehead. “The Cossacks will get us!” she said in Yiddish. “They’ll know!”

  Rose had wanted to cremate her husband. “Graves are for zhe livink!” she said. “Zhey are so we may visit. Zhe dead don’t come, Frances, zhey’re dead!”

  Maybe she simply couldn’t deal with having yet another place to have to clean. But surely the threat of dust would have kept Frances’s mother from cremating her husband. Frances imagined her keeping Abraham in a nice urn on the dresser, her mother opening it, and, like a little genie, Abraham swirling out and granting her the wishes he had never been able to make come true while he was alive.

  Frances wouldn’t have it. “He was a Jew,” she said. “Why must you take that away from him?”

  At the burial, Frances stood with her mother, a few folks from the neighborhood, and the rabbi over the grave and watched her sister pull up in a long black car. In her black veil and dark glasses—who did she think she was, Janet Gaynor?—Pauline stumbled across the grass in high heels and bent over Abraham’s grave. She did not look at Frances. Is she not going to so much as speak to me? Frances wondered. Was the Terrier in that car? Frances craned her neck to get a better look. Pauline didn’t se
em to see anyone as she took a handful of dirt from a shovel the rabbi held out to her. With her jeweled fingers, Pauline threw the dirt, her body heaving with what Frances came to believe was merely drama. Then Pauline got into that car and drove away.

  Back at the house, Frances prepared the place for the shiva. Surely she’s coming to the house to mourn, Frances thought as she pulled out a cinder block for her sister to sit on. Like a love-struck girl, she waited for her sister, and each day she was met with what she now realized she had always been met with: disappointment. Frances remembered all those times she had watched her sister preening, all the times Pauline had taken the largest slice of babka, how she had abandoned Frances for a life of luxury. For things. Money. As she waited for her sister to come and grieve for their father—their father, who had given them life, who had brought them to this country, who had tried to give Pauline what she had wanted but had tried as well to show them the value of learning—Frances mentally threw the key to her house of rage into the East River.

  The only thing that quelled her fury was faith. Each evening, after her stint at the candy store, Frances, who had never before set foot in a synagogue, went to minyan, though she knew neither she nor her mourning would be counted. Despite the fact that she was not his son, Franny said Kaddish for her father every night for that year, and every night for a year she lit a candle in memory.