Golden Country
Page 25
But it would be better to be near her mother, thought Miriam, than to remain beneath Betsy Randolph. And so it was decided: Wellesley it would be. When Betsy invited her for a weekend at Smith during their winter carnival to get high and just let loose, Miriam decided she would go simply for the fun of it.
Betsy had been pinned—by Ben Belmont, a senior—and so, that weekend in Northampton, they went to a Sigma Chi party.
“I can’t believe you’ll be graduating!” Betsy screamed, hugging Dulcy Bloom, also raised to be a Smith girl, when she sauntered up to her at the punch bowl. Betsy placed her arms around the girl’s neck, her eyes flashing first with approval and then with envy she could not conceal. And it was Dulcy, Miriam noted, who pulled away first from their embrace, introducing her little brother, David Bloom, a freshman at Amherst.
Betsy pumped David’s hand. Miriam peered out from behind her friend and waited for her introduction. When she saw it was not forthcoming, Miriam poked her friend in the side.
“Oh,” Betsy said, still beaming at Dulcy. “Miriam.” Betsy held her hand out limply toward Miriam and waved it for a moment toward the Bloom siblings. “Dulcy is a good friend of Ben’s. And this is David. Aren’t you a swimmer?” she asked him.
David Bloom was obviously troubled by this introduction. “Yes,” he said. “I suppose I am.”
So humble, thought Miriam. And then she pictured this boy before her in goggles and swim trunks, cutting the blue water with his strong arms, pulling himself up out of the pool and dripping water onto the cement. At that moment, Miriam ached for the scent of chlorine, and she wished she could smell it now on David Bloom. She sniffed up against him.
“Hi,” he said just to Miriam, as if they were two children among adults, just as they had been nearly a decade ago at the World’s Fair. Though he had no awareness of that moment, David had noticed Miriam when she first entered the room, how, with her hair pulled back in a chignon, her cheekbones looked like they would leap from her face. He could tell, even with it pulled back so severely, that her hair beamed with good health. “I really love your hairdo.” He reached up to bring a strand that had miraculously sprung loose out of her eyes.
Miriam’s heart: bang bang bang bang bang. Could he hear it? “Thank you.” She looked down. He looked just like Orson Welles. Just like him. “You look a bit like Orson Welles,” she said. “But I imagine people say that all the time.”
“No,” he said. “I’ve never been told that before.” Flashes of light burst into David’s eyes. Orson Welles, the genius. At seventeen, he already saw himself becoming terribly unlike the man he thought he would be. Perhaps this was the girl who could see through his athletic exterior to the very core of him—okay, he might as well say it, to his heart.
They stayed near each other the entire evening, watching as the older students flitted and preened, smoked cigarettes and got drunk. And when Betsy came by to retrieve Miriam as if she were a package waiting to be exchanged at the post office for a slip of pink paper, David kissed Miriam’s cheek, lingering there long enough to tell her that, had they been alone, his lips would have searched for her mouth.
That night sealed it for Miriam, and the following autumn it was at Northampton, not Wellesley, where Miriam arrived, bringing with her many expectations. Along with her educational hopes—if it was not a hunger for learning Miriam possessed, it was certainly a desire to be learned—was an expectation of the affection of a swimmer named David Bloom.
And yet, by the time autumn came, David Bloom had already taken up with another girl, Asher Brook. And when she arrived at Smith, Miriam had been so caught up in the moment—the clubs, the teas, the dieting, the girls, the mixers—she had forgotten the past intensity of her own feelings. By the time things with Asher had petered out—or rather, by the time Asher had fled to New York City to become an actress with a set of Inez Bloom’s sherry glasses—and David was single, he ran into Miriam on the Smith campus in another’s embrace. A Harvard man, he recalled having heard from one of her dorm mates. His sister had told David she was the heiress to the Essoil fortune. And just as Dulcy had said it—Essoil—David had imagined an empty room with billowing curtains, shining with purity. He could smell the fresh, sanitized scent of pine, and it made him remember his grandmother’s beauty shop, the way light caught the surface of everything and gleamed. It had gotten so that, when David so much as caught a glimpse of Miriam, he felt as if he were inhaling freshness itself, along with the best parts of his childhood spent with his grandmother. He would look at her and see cleanliness, white, white sheets, a diffuse morning light.
In her four years of college, Miriam managed to develop interests besides boys and pretty hats. She studied Spanish literature and Spanish linguistics. Struggling over conjugation, and attempting to translate such foreign texts always made Miriam think of her father and his ceaseless efforts not only to learn English better but to sound more American. Miriam knew she could never sound Spanish, which may be why when she graduated, she decided she wanted to go not to Spain but to Costa Rica. To the forest, she’d said. Monkeys. She imagined them swinging on branches high above her head. She imagined parrots. Miriam lived there for half a year teaching English, and it was there that she met Enrique Lopez.
Had it been the foreignness that attracted her to Enrique? Simply to hear her name uttered in the throes of passion on a Spanish-speaking tongue? Or was it the way he stunned her with his knowledge of biology: That’s a colibri, he’d said at Lake Caño Negro. He had shown her around a foreign land, and she adored him for it. In Costa Rica, she attempted to twist her tongue away from her lisping Castilian Spanish, and as she moved more and more toward her South American Spanish, she thought of staying. But the sad eyes of her father asking her why would always bring her back home. And so Miriam thought about taking Enrique with her, though she knew that, were she to set up house with him in some New England town or city, his accent would annoy her. All that was so natural to him in South America—from the way he dressed to the manner in which he twirled his fingers—would be out of place.
Miriam and Enrique had been together nearly the whole time she had lived in Costa Rica. Here is a lemur, he had said. Here is a longtailed monkey. Once she had been so overwhelmed by him—his difference and at the same time his sameness to her—that she had thrown her arms around him out there in the middle of that muggy forest beneath a sky of wet green leaves. And though she dated many boys upon her return to the States, the way she and Enrique had fallen to the ground, groping each other like wildlife, would give her cause to shiver, and she always imagined ending up in the arms of her Costa Rican lover.
David Bloom had his share of girlfriends after Asher Brook. Esmé Perez was a dark Venezuelan actress with a proclivity toward slamming him over the head with her purse when she’d had more than three drinks. David had once been delighted by Esmé’s negative effect on his family. At first, when the two were at parties uptown or slumming in Spanish Harlem, David wouldn’t want to make the long trip downtown to his little place on Jane Street, where there were never any clean sheets and no one was there to serve them breakfast each morning. And so he would slip into his parents’ East Side brownstone and sneak his girlfriend into his childhood bedroom. The two of them would slide into his twin bed, the sheets drawn tightly across their bodies as if they were two frogs pinned to a resin-filled dissection tray.
Very little cheered David more than the expression on Sarah Bloom’s face when he and Esmé came down for breakfast, David in his boyhood terry robe, the sleeves to his elbows. Always barefoot, Esmé would come down in one of his dress shirts, her burgundy nipples pressed against the light shirt cloth that reached just below her underwear.
Sarah feigned disaffection with her son’s brazen behavior. “Good morning, dear,” she said and flicked open the Times, then brought the fresh-squeezed orange juice to her lips with a trembling hand. “What will you have for breakfast?” she asked, never looking at him. “And you, dear?” she sa
id in the vague direction of Esmé.
Esmé extended her long legs and wiggled her scarlet-painted toes at David’s feet. She brought her long arms high over her head, the tails of David’s shirt rising above her panties, their stark whiteness somehow more obscene than black would have been against her skin. “For breakfast?” She stretched and yawned. “Let’s see.” She stood up and went to stand behind David’s chair.
That was when Sarah looked up from “Dear Maggie.” “Yes, for breakfast,” she said flatly.
Esmé leaned over David and put her arms around his neck. He felt her breasts, cushioning the base of his skull, and he wondered whether her cleavage was visible to his mother. “A bit of sausage?” She giggled into David’s thick hair, and he chuckled.
“Mary, darling,” Sarah said, “would you please serve my son’s whore some sausage?”
And then, turning to Esmé and David, she said, “I’m assuming you’ll take eggs with your pork?”
Enrique Lopez, Miriam was sad to admit, had not been the one for her. This became all too clear when, on his way to New York, where he was interviewing for a job at the World Bank, Enrique briefly visited with Miriam’s parents in their new house in Maine. The previous year they had bought a large ranch-style house above Baxter Boulevard that looked out over Casco Bay.
Before Enrique had arrived, Esther took her daughter aside and said, “I hope you have not let this man, well, I hope he has not been inside you,” she said. “Because that won’t do at all. First of all, you realize he isn’t Jewish.”
“I realize this,” Miriam said, sticking her ring finger in her mouth.
Esther rubbed her temples.
Joseph stood in front of the open fridge eating from a carton of Brigham’s chocolate ribbon. “Essie, please!” he said.
“What?” she screamed to her husband, in the kitchen. “You wouldn’t catch a South American girl just hopping in the sack with any boy. Those Catholics don’t do that. That’s why he’s going with an American. Americans have reputations.” Esther collapsed onto the living room couch—the palest pink chintz—and brought her hand to her head. “Miriam,” she said. “Fetch me an aspirin before you kill me, will you, dear?”
Ultimately, Miriam would always listen to her mother. In fact, Miriam had not had intercourse with Enrique, though she was bewildered by the separation of this act from the many others that the two had performed together. For hours they would lie around touching, kissing, licking, feeling. Enrique too seemed confused about these boundaries, and that night, sneaking into her bedroom while Joseph and Esther were asleep in their twin beds, he tried to make his confusion felt. He did this with such brute force that Miriam pushed him out of the bed, and a rather chaotic scuffle ensued, ending with one of Esther’s prized Hummel figurines—the country doctor with his stethoscope—getting broken to bits.
“Huh!” Miriam was aghast. The altercation ended with the young couple on their hands and knees, for neither love nor sex but only to pick up the shards of porcelain.
Miriam demanded her boyfriend’s departure, and he left the house in the middle of the night without so much as a word of good-bye to her parents.
The next morning Esther inquired after the man and Miriam made an excuse about a late-night phone call, a sick mother, an emergency at the office—one too many things to go wrong at once, if you asked Joseph, who sat down at the breakfast table across from his daughter and his wife. Miriam’s face was still red and swollen from a night of crying. Even her nose seemed to have puffed up, for once making its presence known, as if to honor her grief.
Esther put her hand over her daughter’s, and Miriam noticed her aging hands. Looking up at her mother, she saw it in her face as well, how the skin now hung more loosely, wrinkles beginning to blaze a system of trails across her cheeks. Mommy, she wanted to say. She wanted to reach out to her. Instead, Miriam thought how she herself was not getting younger. What if Enrique had been the one and she hadn’t even noticed? Had she let the right man slip away? And at that moment she remembered David Bloom, a large boy from the swim team, walking away from her. Would she always look at men from this perspective? she wondered, beginning to cry again.
“Such a shame. Enrique was such a nice boy,” Esther said. “Your father and I were talking, just now, about how much we liked him. What did you do, Miriam? Must you drive everyone away?”
Esmé Perez helped David triumph, if temporarily, in the silent war waged between mother and son for the unprecedented resentment each held toward the other. They had so clearly robbed each other of happiness. But David Bloom’s affairs of the heart had consequences similar to Miriam’s.
However swell Esmé was on his arm at a party’s beginning, by its end—they always stayed too damn long at these affairs, forgetting both how much they had drunk and how severely what they drank affected them—she was a dreadful sight. There was the hissing and the crying, the mascara running down the face, and then the snakeskin bag that without fail made its way over David’s head at least once. Ultimately, he got sick to death of being beaten by his girlfriend. His own physical injury outweighed the psychic misery he knew his girlfriend caused his mother.
So one day David marched into Esmé’s rehearsal to tell her he was leaving. After making sure she was not holding a hard or heavy object, he simply said, “We’re through, baby. Through.” His right hand cut the air, and he waited—a little hopefully, as he had not lost his penchant for the dramatic—for the scene to break open.
What followed stunned David: Esmé began to laugh. In fact, she hooted and cackled, slapping her leg as she wiped at her eyes. This was a reaction for which he had not rehearsed, so he looked around to see the other actors bemusedly watching the scene.
Head held high, David walked out of the theater, that terrible girl’s laughter behind him until he opened the door and headed into the lobby and then out into the daylight of the street, the heavy outer door clicking closed behind him.
Miriam Brodsky and David Bloom were privately mulling over their dashed affairs when, in 1956, they crashed into each other on the corner of Forty-second and Broadway, one of the busiest intersections in the country. David, now a theater producer like his father, was coming from a lunch meeting with other producers who were talking about talking to more producers to get more producers to produce Gypsy. Miriam, who had become a translator for the UN, was getting tickets to My Fair Lady because her mother would be driving down this weekend. You don’t go to the theater enough, Miri, Esther had said. But Miriam knew this was more an excuse for her to take the trip to Manhattan to see her daughter. “Why don’t the boys you date ever take you to a nice show?” Esther had asked after telling Miriam that everyone—everyone!—was talking about Rex Harrison, and Esther could not wait to see this production that had all of Portland buzzing.
Why they were both walking backward—later Miriam would say she heard a large bang that had made her look skyward, but David would always maintain that someone had passed out behind him and screamed as she crumpled to the ground—is still unknown, but they backed right into each other. They snapped around, coming face-to-face on a street corner in Manhattan.
“Miriam Brodsky?”
She was dressed in a red suit with a matching red hat, and she looked sensational. He checked for a wedding ring and found her hands to be concealed by black kid gloves. David wondered at that moment why they hadn’t ended up dating in college, because he had really enjoyed her that one evening. Simply the way Miriam gestured had delighted him, and the self-conscious way she held her drink and her cigarette he found terribly chic.
Miriam held the top of her hat and looked up at David. David Bloom, she thought. David Bloom. And once again: bang bang bang bang. She had to laugh at herself. He was not going to dupe her again, no sir. Since then he had long faded into only an idea: this boy who had made her change her mind about college and had taken her from her mother’s clutches.
“David Bloom,” she said, shaking his hand.
“Move it!” someone screamed as he passed by. David put his hand at the small of Miriam’s back and guided her to the curb.
Sixteen candlelit dinners, seven Broadway shows, four walks in Central Park, one hundred and eighteen turns around around the rink at Rockefeller Center, one visit to the Met, two breakfasts, a brunch at the Plaza, a total of ninety days after they ran into each other on Forty-second and Broadway, one night at the Shubert (not his father’s theater, he’d made sure of it) during the intermission of Bells Are Ringing, David got down on his knees and asked Miriam Brodsky to be his forever. By the time the lights had flashed on and off, and the audience members were heading back to their seats for the second act, Miriam had told him yes.
Despite the dirty money on David’s side and the family of peasants on Miriam’s, their union appeared to be a perfect match. No one—not Joseph, not Seymour, not Frances Gold—told them how they had met nearly two decades earlier on the grounds of the World’s Fair and that, for better or for worse, their families were as stitched together as an American quilt.
Not a year later, in the summer of 1957, the year Seymour’s play Separate Tables won the Tony for Best Actress, Bells Are Ringing cleaning up the rest, Miriam Brodsky and David Bloom were married in Portland, Maine.