But David had no idea how hard Seymour had worked or just what he had done to lay claim to those theaters, or why, as unreliable as the theater was for business, it was what got Seymour out of bed in the morning. David had no idea, because his father had never told him that, really, their dreams were as linked as David’s and Sarah’s. No, Seymour had not wanted to be an actor; he had wanted to be in the audience. Every moment of his life he had wanted to spend looking up at the stage, to be brought to laughter, to tears, to unfettered joy. Seymour had never passed on to his son that it was okay—wonderful even—to be a spectator.
Had Sarah stripped that idea of experience from David? Made him believe that he had to be the lead, not be moved by him, and then prevented him from playing him altogether? Opening nights, watching the actors join hands and move forward, gesturing to the orchestra, standing until the curtain swooped closed around them, David never ceased to wonder at what he could have been had he not been so desperate for his mother’s approval. He would never enjoy a show, so unyielding were his thoughts of all the roles that had been wrested away from him as he watched men with far less talent playing nightly on the stage that bore his father’s good name.
Unlike David’s, Miriam Brodsky’s childhood was informed less by what she wanted than by what she, or more her mother, did not want. What Esther did not want had become enormous. The last straw came the day the Globe arrived at the house for a photo shoot to accompany a piece on Joseph, the man behind the Essoil phenomenon. When sipping her tea after dinner, Esther opened the evening newspaper and flipped to the photograph of her beautiful family. Upon seeing it, she screamed so loudly both Joseph and Miriam came running.
“Look!” she said, pointing to the grainy image. “All I can see is Miriam’s nose!”
Miriam gasped and brought both hands to her face.
“Esther!” Joseph said. “Now come on.”
“Enough is enough,” Esther said, peeling Miriam’s hands from her face. “We can’t fight this fight alone anymore. We’re going to New York City.”
And so in February of 1945, Esther did what so many good Jewish mothers did and do, which was to take her daughter to New York City to see a certified plastic surgeon and have the torture be done with already. But secretly. Esther made arrangements for them to stay at the Carlyle for her daughter’s convalescence, or until the bandages came off. In case something turns out wrong and we have to go back in, Esther told her daughter, making it sound as if Miriam was an under-cooked roast.
The night before they were to leave for Manhattan, Miriam Brodsky dreamt of hats. Her mother had always told her that her present profile did not allow for such accessories, as, no matter how floppy or large the brim, no matter how high or pushed back the crown, all that seemed to emerge from beneath the felt or straw or fur was that irrepressible nose. In her dream she stood in Bergdorf’s before a full-length mirror as the saleslady passed her hat upon hat, smiling approvingly as young Miriam placed one after another on her head. Each looked more fetching than the one before. Even when a rubber bathing cap was handed over and she tucked her hair inside it, she looked grand, as graceful and exquisite as the Hollywood starlets who pranced around the pools of Beverly Hills.
On the train to Pennsylvania Station, Miriam looked out the window as the scenery flew by and imagined her own landscape changing. She looked over at her mother, who stared straight ahead, hands folded in her lap. Her mother’s profile, Miriam noted, was really quite lovely. Esther possessed a timeless beauty, her dark eyes flanked by the beginning not of a big nose but of a strong one, a feature rendering her face both anachronistic and timeless. As she watched her mother, Miriam began to panic that this quality would now be wrested from her own face. Yes, she would be able to wear any hat she wished, but would her face become a generic face? Would it be her face? When she and her sister, Gloria, walked along the dock at camp, would people know they were leaves from the same tree? When Joseph took her to Old Orchard Beach, would others know she held the hand of her father? And, like last summer, when she had grown too old to hold her father’s hand and had pulled away from him, stuffing her hand into the pocket of her skirt, would others know, as he had to have known, that this was a daughter who had outgrown her father’s touch? It’s okay, sugar, he had said as they walked on the boardwalk, past the Ferris wheel, past the house of mirrors, the funnel cake and oyster stands. Miriam had pretended not to hear him.
She looked away from her mother now and back out the window. Watching the trees zip by, she picked at a string coming loose on the stitching of her handbag and brought the other hand to her nose. Miriam pretended to rub the cartilage as if it itched. Its fleshiness disgusted her, and she pushed the flesh down so that the tip of her nose touched her upper lip, forming a tentative frown. No, Miriam thought. It must go, she resolved, and, as if reading her mind and acknowledging that her decision was the right one, at that very moment the train went underground.
The Brodsky women headed straight to the Carlyle. Miriam remembered their stay nearly six years before, when they had come for the World’s Fair. But this was no celebration. This time she and Esther would stay for the two weeks it took for Miriam to recover from the mad way the doctor broke her nose only to have the chance to mend it again. Beneath her eyes was such a wash of blues and grays and purples, she would find herself more astonished by these bruises than worried for the healing occurring beneath the bandages. Miriam peered sadly out her window onto Madison Avenue, longing to look into the department store windows, to walk on the cold city streets, to dine in the cafés, stroll in the park, gaze at the Rembrandts at the Met. But she would not be humiliated.
“But this is why we came here,” Esther said, clearly intolerant of her daughter’s embarrassment. “Who the heck do you know in New York?”
“I know Nana Selma,” she said.
“Well, we’re not going to see Nana Selma,” said Esther. “Can you imagine?” Esther laughed and set her voice an octave higher: “She’s getting a new what? Heymish! she’d call me. My granddaughter has a fine nose, just like her father’s!”
Miriam flopped down on the couch, ignoring Esther. “I can’t,” she said. “I just can’t go out there like this!” It was not only her appearance that shook her confidence—Miriam had been told never to touch the bandages. Even the slightest knock on the nose could ruin everything. Imagine it as a gestation period, like when you have a baby, the surgeon had said. Miriam had been embarrassed and could not look directly at him. Now, simply pulling a sweater over her head, she feared for the pressure of the light wool on the bridge of her brand-new nose.
They agreed that going to the movies would be fine. State Fair was playing at the Paris, and Miriam knew she could jump out of a cab and into the darkened theater and feel at ease. And it was just by the Plaza, too! How Miriam longed to go inside for tea and look out at the carriages waiting by the park, the dapple gray horses stomping their hooves.
Getting ready to go to the cinema, Miriam was very careful to pull her light green angora sweater gently over her head. It was at that strange point in getting dressed, when she felt that she was both appearing and disappearing at the same time, that Esther called to her.
“Miri!” her mother sang. “Did you bring any perfume? I left my No. 5 at home.”
Hearing her mother, Miriam turned her head and, in so doing, did the absolutely unthinkable, the very thing she had lain on her back at night in bed aching to avoid, which was knock herself anywhere near the nose. In her turning toward Esther, not only did the sweater press down on her nose, but she also knocked herself on the bedpost, right in the three-thousand-dollar center of her face.
“Oh my God!” Miriam struggled to get her sweater either on or off. But because, in the panic of the situation, she had not decided which way she would rather it go, one arm moved up, the other down, creating more strain on the already broken—and now perhaps re broken!—nose. “Oh my God!” she screamed again.
Esther hurried o
ut of the bathroom. “Are there mice?” she asked. “Miriam!” Esther jumped back. “What are you doing? Why, you’ll bend the thing entirely out of shape!” she said.
Miriam didn’t know if her mother was referring to the new sweater set, which had been a present from her father, or if she meant her new nose, which she supposed was more her mother’s gift.
Esther went to Miriam and gently pulled the sweater over her daughter’s head to reveal her hysterical face.
Miriam pointed at her nose. “I hit it,” she said when she could speak, afraid even to bend her head, as if the very force of gravity would make whatever was left of her nose slide down and fall off. “On the bedpost,” she sobbed.
Miriam could see her mother was trying to remain calm. She took a deep breath and ran her hands over the sweater, smoothing out any wrinkles. “How hard?” Esther asked.
Miriam had gained a little control over her weeping. Really she was weeping for the whole goddamn thing, for having been given a nose in need of fixing to begin with, one that she had to have broken, of all things. And the pain of that breaking, and being cooped up here, her mother coming in from the street with all these beautiful packages and not a thing for her. Why, you got a new nose, Esther said when Miriam pouted. I should think that would be enough for any girl.
“I hit it hard,” Miriam said and began to cry again.
Even though it was nearly dinnertime, Esther went to call the surgeon. And even though he was at the Century Club, he told her he would have a look immediately.
“I don’t like the sound of this at all,” Esther said.
When the doctor met them at the hospital, he whisked the Brodsky women into an examining room. As he stepped back from undoing the bandages, Miriam watched for her mother’s expression. The doctor and Esther sighed heavily with what seemed to Miriam to be relief.
“It’s fine.” The doctor stroked Miriam’s shoulder. “Just fine,” he said. This calmed her, and she closed her eyes, imagining the sophistication of the chignon she would soon wear at the nape of her neck.
“Would you like to see it?” he asked.
“Yes,” Miriam said, her eyes still closed.
“Remember what I told you about gestation? The one thing about taking it so soon from its cocoon of bandages,” said the doctor, “is that it’s just a wee bit premature.” He handed her a mirror.
Miriam was shocked at her reflection. Or more at what was lacking in that image. She had expected all the bruising to be gone, all the glue from the tape miraculously scraped from her face, the puffiness between her eyes reduced. But this was not the case, and, with all that mess, Miriam could not find her nose at all. She furrowed her brow.
“But where is it?” She had her hands on her face as she leaned into the doctor. She took in a deep breath, but she couldn’t smell a thing.
The doctor went behind his young patient and looked with her into the handheld mirror. “See?” he said. His face rose behind hers. He pointed to two dark spots above the mouth on his own face. Miriam had mistaken what was on her own face for moles or, worse, pimples. Closing her mouth and taking another breath just to make sure, she realized that though she couldn’t smell a thing, these were in fact her nostrils.
“Oh!” She nodded.
“As I said”—the doctor turned toward Esther Brodsky—“it was a little premature—a preemie we call it—but it should grow a little bit more unless the blow completely stunted it.”
Esther nodded thoughtfully, her finger to the side of her own nose. Again Miriam looked at her mother’s face for guidance. “Either way,” Esther said. “We love it.”
Miriam nodded again and placed the tips of her fingers on her face as gently as she could. She inhaled, but still, no smell.
“Careful!” the doctor and Esther said at the same time. They turned to each other and smiled.
But Miriam was searching with her hands for her nose. She felt a tiny bone running down the center and, at the end, a minute dollop of flesh, as if placed there as garnish. “Thank you,” she said and pushed herself off the examining table.
“Yes, thank you, Doctor,” Esther said, taking her daughter’s hand.
The day of their return home, Miriam was lying on her bed, hands behind her head, daydreaming, when she overheard her mother on the phone with their neighbor Peggy Sanders.
“We had a terrible scare, Peg!” Esther cradled the phone between her shoulder and her neck and moved around the kitchen. “It was quite a crash. Miri hit the back of the front seat, hard.”
There was a silence as the woman on the other end of the receiver spoke.
“No,” Esther said. “Why, yes, we did take the train to Manhattan. It was in a taxicab. It was just terrible. Why, they should simply be out-lawed.”
Miriam wandered into the hallway, her sandals dragging along the shag carpet. She stopped and leaned her head against the wall, running her fingertips along it. Remembering the smell of her mother’s house, a combination of flowers and Essoil and cold weather, she sniffed again and nearly burst into tears when what registered was only emptiness. Did losing her nose mean losing her memory? Miriam brushed her nose ever so lightly and tried to imagine the way it would have in fact felt to have her neck whipped back and her head thrown forward when the taxi stopped just short of hitting the car in front of them.
As the doctor had anticipated, the nose would continue to grow, though it did maintain a slightly premature state. It was almost as it must have looked when she had been developing in her mother’s womb, before the protrusion had grown enough to knock Esther in the vagina in the first place. But from that day forward it would be only Miriam’s eyes and ears that could bring her back to the mixing of bleach and soap and ammonia that worked together to make her father rich. Her mother’s smell of lipstick and roses would be lost to her. And with it, taste. No longer would she be able to savor her mother’s scalloped potatoes and beef stew, the cotton candy she sneaked with her father on the boardwalk at Old Orchard. Although sometimes she would forget, and, upon entering a bakery, or walking through a field after rain, Miriam would take a huge whiff. Each time it was the same. She would be able to feel the texture of warm bread and remember the flavor of yeast and rye and butter, feel the wet grass between her wriggling toes, but Miriam would never be able to smell again.
Chapter 15
Star Quality: Essoil, 1946
WHO KNEW THAT, HOWEVER indirectly, Miriam Brodsky’s father and David Bloom’s father, so philosophically different, would end up doing business together? As it turned out, Joseph unwittingly teamed up with the ex-mobster Seymour Bloom. Joseph and Seymour would benefit so much from each other, they might as well have been partners.
As Joseph had watched Vladimir’s demonstration at the World’s Fair, almost a decade before, he’d had a vision: What if Essoil, not Judy Garland, sang its way into each American heart and every American living room? What better way to appeal to the individual? Joseph had thought, as he’d stood with Miriam that day. It would be just like selling door-to-door, only now it would be over the shortwave. All the people who owned televisions would have to listen to his pitch. What choice did they have? Joseph would be right there in the living room with them, and no one would be able to slam the door and leave him holding his two scratched-up cases outside in the cold. No one could tell him, These are tough times, mister. Good-bye.
In April 1946, Joseph Brodsky sat in his Boston office, high above the Essoil plant. He looked over his eight-year-old company, the factory downstairs, the secretaries out front, the accountants, the sales force, the reps coming in out of the cold spring air from their stops at institutions along the burgeoning highways. The world had changed, but what really amazed Joseph was the manner in which it was still changing.
Now he wanted to do something different for his advertising campaign. The one in the national magazines had been a little dull, if you asked him. If not dull then run-of-the-mill: a woman happily shopping for not just one but two bottles
of Essoil; a skipper on the bow of his boat extolling the virtues of using Essoil to clean decks. The point was to show just how multipurpose his product could be, it was true, but Joseph hated the inert quality of these ads.
He had tried to be innovative, placing his advertisements right above the ever-popular “Dear Maggie.” Just that morning, a box above the column—a tombstone ad, the booker had called it—had appeared with a photo of the bottle and a cartoon woman in an apron singing: “It’s so easy when you use Essoil!” He had tried to focus on this, and not the letter below, which he had found disturbing the way he had found the whole column disturbing: Dear Maggie, the letter had begun, from M in Massachusetts. I wish that I were beautiful. What is beautiful anyway? Who should I ask? And who do you think would tell me?
How terrible, Joseph thought now, watching all the scurrying below. Girls growing up with no sense of confidence.
The radio campaign, though more dynamic, could not, of course, actually show the astounding results of cleaning with Essoil. He could have included testimonial after testimonial—these tended to work best with radio—but seeing the all-purpose detergent clean was really the point, was it not?
Besides, soon no one would need a radio at all—everyone was buying a television. Joseph could see his own reflection in the pane of smoked glass that looked over what anyone would call an empire. For a brief moment, he saw himself on a television screen. He knew he could not be the one to stand up and speak for the very product he’d invented. “Clean up this voild!” he’d say. One couldn’t say such a thing now: the mess had grown far too large. Clean up the Nazi criminals? With Essoil! Joseph laughed, mocking himself. I don’t think so. But he didn’t trust the United Nations to do it either. Those men could not suffer enough. Clean up the mess at Hiroshima? At Nagasaki? Of course it was all impossible. He had heard people’s skin melted from their bones. The suffering: it overwhelmed him. What would his father think now? Joseph wondered. Would he still believe that here was the golden country, to which one thousand Jews sailed from Germany with hope, this place whose leader claimed their entry permits were invalid and sent them back?
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