Golden Country

by Jennifer Gilmore

“The rabbis had a certain use for your husband and his friends when they needed them,” Frances said. “Anyway, he’s still alive, you know.”

  “Not to me he’s not.” Pauline set out a bowl of nuts.

  “Why? Because he can’t buy you another fur coat?” Frances asked.

  “Whatever you say, that man is dead to me.”

  “How can you say that? You think anyone believes you didn’t know what he was doing all day?”

  “Think what you want,” Pauline said.

  “I already do,” said Frances.

  Frances remembered mourning for her father. How could Pauline not have sat with them?

  “Just who do you think will be coming to this anyway?” Frances asked her sister.

  “I don’t care,” Pauline said. “Anyone who wants to know how I feel about it. Anyone who might want me dead and might think I’m still connected to him. So if you don’t like it, you can go ahead and leave.”

  Frances nodded. Her sister believed she was going to be killed. Was this a shiva for herself? “I think I will,” Frances said, appalled at just about everything her sister had said and done for the past eight years. “Good-bye then.”

  Pauline looked over at Frances and stood still for a moment.

  Even with the makeup, all the jewels, her bobbed hair, Frances could see her sister for the first time since she’d left South Fifth Street. She is a scared little girl in a costume, thought Frances. And, in turn, Pauline seemed to be seeing Frances for the first time since she’d gone, looking at her with the fierce and tender love of an older sister. “Bye, Frances,” she said.

  As quickly as it had come, her look passed, and Pauline returned to bringing out the silver to place in the empty parlor, which was still decorated like an Egyptian tomb.

  Frances walked past Pauline and onto the pebbled walkway, past the palm trees and the sphinxes; she pushed open the golden gate with the flat of her hand, thinking of the bars that Solomon would be behind that evening. Though she couldn’t be sure of it, Frances thought she might not ever see Pauline again. She could never have imagined it, all those nights Pauline had folded back the bedcovers and told her, Come here, don’t be afraid. Cold January nights, the coal always running out, the two of them, pressed against each other for warmth. Had anyone told Frances that she would one day walk away from her sister forever without looking once behind her, she would have thought they were out of their minds.

  Seven days after the Terrier’s trial, Pauline Brodsky and her son vanished. Into thin air, the Post reported. Many women left New York and changed their names to avoid gangster ties, the Post said. They became Donovan or Dickens and disappeared into the straight world. Perhaps this was what Mrs. Terrier had done. “Has the Terrier’s Bitch Fled the Kennel?” the headline read.

  For days the papers reported how repossession men were stripping the house of everything: the furniture, the fine china, the cars and tennis rackets. The papers ran photos of many of these items—fine Chinese vases, silver tea services, solid gold statuettes.

  “Would you look at this?” Frances said over breakfast one morning with her husband. She stood up from her chair and went to Vladimir, seated across from her. She punched the paper open for him. “Just look!”

  “I see it, Frances,” he said, delicately tapping his spoon at his soft-boiled egg.

  She had to laugh at the idea, more her fantasy, of all of Solomon’s possessions—a pharaoh’s riches—being taken away to be buried with him. “I really should go up there.”

  Vladimir lopped off the tip of his egg, and Frances gasped. It was as if he had chopped off the top of her thumb. Bits of yolk dribbled down the shell and the silver egg holder, then slowly began to pool in the little saucer she had brought him moments before with such care.

  “Absolutely not,” he said. “It’s a crime scene. Do you realize this? It’s the scene of a crime.”

  Frances looked over at her husband. He had a permanent red welt on his nose from working so late in his spectacles, and she looked at it now as he put down his spoon and rubbed his eyes. “Come on. It’s not really a crime scene. I just want to know what’s happened to everything. There might be some of my mother’s stuff, you know.”

  And just what were they doing with all those books? Frances wondered. She remembered Solomon’s pride in his library. Yes, he loved all his possessions, but he had been particularly proud of having so many books.

  “No, I won’t allow it, I’m sorry,” Vladimir said wearily. “Enough is enough, Frances.”

  Frances felt like she would cry. “But I must go up there!” she shrieked.

  The more hysterical she became, the calmer her husband got. “Nope,” he said.

  Frances stormed out of the kitchen and into the bedroom, where she threw herself on the bed. She considered defying Vladimir as she had her parents when Pauline had gotten married.

  Frances could hear the tinkling of Vladimir’s spoon as he resumed eating as serenely as he’d been before she’d stomped out of the kitchen. She could hear him turning the pages of the paper in a slow and measured fashion, and this infuriated her.

  She wished she was back at her parents’ flat on South Fifth, listening to her mother’s cleaning, her father’s ceaseless talking, as she waited for Pauline to crawl into bed with her. Where had her sister gone?

  For one moment Frances thought not of what Pauline had stolen from her but of the small moments of kindness that had passed between them when they were girls. Her earliest memory was one of the first times they’d slept in this country and how, when her excitement had turned to a heightened anxiety, she had crawled into bed with Pauline, slipped beneath the covers, and curled up next to her. Pauline had lifted her arm and let Frances place her head on her chest. Frances remembered crying and crying that night, for no reason she could name even now, but for a general sadness for a lost past, an anticipation of a difficult future, inexorable change, and Pauline had pulled her close and let her sister drench her nightshirt with tears. That night Pauline had been her hero.

  Frances got up. She went to her vanity and sat down, looked herself in the eyes. She raised her chin and cast her eyes downward just a bit, her head tilted to the side. Her father appeared in her eyes. Frances could see Abraham, trying to get out of bed, and at the same time she was him, her look now identical to his, the eyes attempting to be strong but instead only pleading. In her mouth, which tugged downward at the sides, Frances saw her mother’s loneliness. She pulled her wild hair back from her face. Everywhere she turned, she still saw her sister.

  Frances thought now of the first night of The Joint, before the critics came, the night the costume girl had pinned back that beautiful, fading dress. Frances had twirled before her, and the girl, pins in her mouth, had been hidden beneath her skirts. The night Frances had closed her eyes and lifted her face to the makeup girl, who brushed powder gently over her cheeks and drew a mole above her lip. Frances had wished her sister could have seen her at that very moment, when people bustled around her, preparing her for stardom. Once it had been Frances who had bent over her sister, filling her lips in with colored stain, and that night it was she whom someone dressed and colored, she who was about to take center stage. What now? she thought.

  Frances imagined her sister walking through the door, right now. Here I am, she would tell Frances. I’ve been gone, but now I’m back. It’s the two of us again, as it used to be. Perhaps she would be gliding toward her in her stocking feet, a stack of books on her head. Remember Miss America? Pauline would say. Remember Mommy’s roast chicken?

  Frances turned away from the mirror and toward the doorway.

  “Pauline,” she said. Frances shook her hair free and placed her hands on her wide hips. “Pauline,” she said, “do you recognize me?”

  Chapter 13

  Iconography of Hope:

  Joseph and Seymour, 1939

  THE DAY JOSEPH DISCOVERED Essoil, he had no idea how huge, and how necessary, his two-in-one cleaning produ
ct would become. To start with, Essoil the all-purpose cleaner was used in many different industries. The dry-cleaning industry, which, despite Stoddard’s pure and odorless solvent, still required two steps to clean garments fully—they were cleaned once in the solvent, then rewashed to remove all insoluble oil, such as perspiration—was the first to jump onboard. This new one-step process cut work time in half, which also cut the cost in half. Essoil was soon snapped up by commercial laundries, hospitals, schools, and prisons. The very institutions that had once turned Joseph away while he was on the road were now begging him for his product. The Depression only fueled the need for Essoil, as it saved so much money and time. After Rikers put in an enormous bulk order, not a day went by that Joseph didn’t think how he was cleaning his brother from a distance and that perhaps from this distance he could purify him.

  The way it seemed to go with Joseph Brodsky, however, was never the way it went with the rest of the world. In the twenties, while everyone was having the time of their lives, Joseph was working his pants off to no end. Closing out the thirties? It had never been such a wonderful time for Joseph and Esther. Only two months ago they had bought a house in Brookline on Pleasant Street. Esther wanted a plush, cream-colored carpet, and a living room with an Art Deco, Oriental touch. She paged through countless shelter magazines and pointed out her favorite designed rooms to Joseph. Gorgeous! he’d say, always deferential to his wife’s fine, modern taste. Vhatever you like, Esther, he’d say. Joseph admired his wife for having married him when he was only a salesman, a Jew from Russia by way of Brooklyn, when her father had been a well-respected lawyer in Portland. He admired her for her belief in him, and, now that he could do so, he would give her anything she liked.

  The rest of the world, Joseph knew, was not so fortunate. People who had once eaten in high style were stealing mustard and sugar for dinner from the Automats. But worse, if you asked Joseph, was what was happening in Germany. Esther could not deny it anymore; the Night of Broken Glass was a concrete event. It had been in the papers. There was no escaping the looting, the broken shop windows, the shattered synagogues and defamed Jewish cemeteries.

  And what of all the German Jews who disappeared the next day? “Where did they go?” Joseph asked.

  “On vacation,” Esther said over the family dinner. “To the moon. What do I know where they went?”

  “The moon?” Miriam said. “You can’t go to the moon.”

  “You’re right, sweetie.” Esther cut meat into small pieces for Gloria. “I was only joking.”

  “I know it is impossible to comprehend. But how can you think zhis is funny?” Joseph asked.

  “I certainly don’t think it’s funny,” Esther said. “Not one bit. But I have to believe it was only one event.” She served Joseph a hefty piece of brisket. “How could this all be true? I have to believe it was a single night and that the mentality of the crowd took over. Otherwise, how am I to just go on?”

  “You are an idiot if you zhink zhis,” Joseph said.

  Esther looked up from ladling carrots. Miriam and Gloria giggled, covering their mouths with their hands.

  “Zhink zhis!” Miriam said.

  “Stop that,” Esther told her daughter. “Right now.”

  “I’m sorry, Esther, but don’t be a fool. And let me tell you. Our children vill be next.” Joseph looked sternly over at the two girls, who quickly stopped laughing.

  “That’s enough, Joe,” Esther said, her eyes filling with tears. “Daddy is just tired,” she told her daughters, gravy spilling onto the plastic tablecloth as she tried to spoon some over Miriam’s beef with a trembling hand.

  Next thing Joseph knew, the Bunds were rallying in Madison Square Garden. And, for the first time since Solomon went to prison, Joseph wished his brother was back on the streets. When news of the broken bones and skulls of all those wretched Nazi sympathizers hit the papers, Joseph knew it hadn’t been the work of rabbis. It was the only time Joseph Brodsky cheered for the gangsters, grateful that the Jews had for once stood up for themselves.

  Esther had sworn off the news altogether. All she read in the papers was “Dear Maggie,” the new syndicated advice column. But she had to pass the op-ed pages to get to it, and not a week after the Night of Broken Glass she came across a reprinted Times editorial opposing the partition of Palestine and suggesting instead that the Jews should resettle in Africa.

  “Africa?” she said, after reading the piece aloud to Joseph. She unpinned her hair and shook it free. “What on earth is that supposed to mean?”

  “I don’t believe it,” Joseph said, tearing the paper from his wife’s hands.

  Esther placed her hair behind her ears, waiting for her husband to tell her she had misread.

  “See?” he said, punching at the page. “See?”

  And yet Joseph was prospering. It was all he could do to scramble a company together and start pumping out enough Essoil to fill the enormous demand. Essoil had become such a phenomenon in one short year that Joseph was invited to bring his invention to the World’s Fair. He received a letter hand-signed by Grover Whalen himself: In our effort to promote clean lines and pure forms, Mr. Whalen, president of the Fair Corporation, wrote, we would like commercial products such as yours to be demonstrated at the Fair. In the hopes that this new mechanized world we inhabit will be a fit and clean place to live in, we think that the designing of a social structure should merge with the design of daily use.

  That the World’s Fair was going to be huge was not up for debate. It was going to change each and every visitor’s life forever. Joseph prepared his booth and began to hire employees who would be able to be there over the next few months, not hard given the staggering unemployment. People were willing to work for ketchup sandwiches. And Joseph was finally making enough money to do whatever he pleased.

  It was a vision of the future—our future, Joseph thought as he began to prepare for the fair. It had been six years since he had said Kaddish for his father. Each night he had come home early from a day on the road for minyan, a yahrtzeit burning for Herbert Brodsky, that suffering man who had watched his elder son turn bad and then go to prison for something far less terrible than the crimes he’d committed. What kind of a lesson was that? America was the promise. Goldene medina, his father would say. America was going to offer his sons their young boy dreams, but he could not recognize that America does not give anything. What it offered for these Brooklyn boys was only what they wrested away from it. And then Joseph said Kaddish for his brother, who as far as he knew was rotting away in prison, with fourteen more years left of his sentence.

  The fairgrounds were empty but for the other exhibitors, the construction workers with nails in their teeth tending to last-minute fix-ups, electricians tapping microphones, the actors rehearsing their lines. The actress who was to be a housewife against the dishwasher—clean as many dishes as she could during one dishwasher cycle—came by the Essoil booth to see if Joseph needed any extra hands while she wasn’t doing a show. And the man set to do his show with Westinghouse’s Moto-Man, the first robot, stopped in to see if he could have some Essoil to polish him before his exhibition. We’ve been cleaning him with Essoil and he loves it! the man said. Joseph laughed and gave him a free bottle.

  It was incredible to Joseph, this veritable city that had risen from the ash of Flushing Meadows and had turned into the ease, speed, and purity of the future. Here he stood at the stark white Trylon, so incredibly tall, over seven hundred feet, he’d read. Taller than the Washington Monument, and inside was the longest elevator in the world, he’d heard. The future, Joseph thought, is limitless. This fair was the future, a true symbol to the world. And it was a symbol for him as well, the way the world had opened up for him, changed toward him. Now people called him sir. They took his calls immediately. Once again, Joseph realized what Solomon had wanted.

  Gimme the herring, gimme the money, the sturgeon, a little schmear here, no please, never thank you. His brother had wanted power and m
oney (and deli), yes, but he’d also wanted to feel like he was part of this country, feel that he was not like their father had been, crossing the Williamsburg Bridge each day for work, a mile and a half to come home to an American shtetl, a little village that screamed and wept, Etta Valensky smirking in that dirty candy store, bringing the community horrible news from the old country. Solomon had had dreams. How had Joseph had none? He wondered this now, passing the Perisphere, a massive, blindingly white sphere connected to the Trylon by a giant ramp.

  Everything is for the future, thought Joseph as he made his way on the pastel pink road across the grounds, past the Transportation Zone, where he’d heard the Futurama, an enormous model of American cities to come, could be viewed from moving chairs with individual loudspeakers. He’d read about the highways planned, where drivers could turn on and off roads at a speed of up to fifty miles an hour. Joseph couldn’t believe it possible—had he still been a salesman on the road, certainly his commissions would have improved.

  Now men were securing the switchback lines for the tremendous crowds expected. Heading toward the Food Zone, Joseph passed Continental Baking Company, a building dotted with colored spots, like the packaging on a loaf of Wonder, this new aerated bread that stayed fresh for days, weeks even. And the Borden Company, the Dairy World of Tomorrow, where inside 150 cows were now being washed and readied for their mechanical milkings. How his mother would hate that. Joseph laughed. Making robots of our food. What goes into your stomachs, she’d say, appalled. And yet, this was science, thought Joseph. Here it was, clean and shiny, gleaming.

  My children will inherit this. He could see the Glass Center, a building made of windows and glass bricks, built, he knew, by the same architects who built the Empire State Building, where he’d heard the governor and his board members conceived and planned the entire fair. He never got over the Empire State. How had they done it? Never in his wildest dreams could he have imagined it. What would Bernie-who-sold-light think now? Perhaps it was a golden world after all.