Golden Country

by Jennifer Gilmore

  Seymour Bloom leaned in to kiss Miriam and Gloria, and then Esther. Still she had that smell he remembered: pressed face powder and lavender, hair spray, lipstick. “Esther,” he said. “I’m so sorry.”

  She nodded slowly.

  “Sarah sends her love,” he said.

  Seymour had thought to bring Sarah and then quickly decided against it. Though he never knew what to expect from his wife, he knew he could count on her to make a spectacle. Just last month he had taken her out for lunch and a walk, and she had insisted on wearing her brassiere over her shirt. The bra had been yellowing, as if it were burned along the edges with an iron held down too long, he remembered now. Fading. She’s fading away, thought Seymour. Then Sarah misplaced her handbag and wept into her corn chowder until the waiter came and took it away. It had infuriated Seymour how he just took the tiny bowl of soup without even asking.

  It wasn’t her fault. But bringing Sarah would not have been right, Seymour had reassured himself as he’d passed the exit to the Longevity Center, driving up to Portland.

  “How is she doing in there?” Esther asked.

  Seymour nodded. “She’s well,” he said, standing. “We’re just so sorry about Joseph.” He wiped his eyes.

  He had been stunned by the news. When David had called to tell him, he’d instantly imagined Joseph tooling around in that crappy little motorboat like he was the cat’s meow. The good life is so damn short, Seymour thought. One moment you’re working to make a better life for yourself, for your children, work morning, noon, night, and then boom, you’re dead before you can relax and enjoy it.

  Seymour patted Esther’s knee and kissed her cheek again. He went out on the stone balcony that overlooked Casco Bay. A boat silhouetted against the setting sun tipped its sail toward the water on its way into shore.

  The tide was out, Seymour could tell. The B & M baked bean factory lighted up as he looked across the water. He smiled to think of Joseph here, standing where he now stood looking out at the water and the lights. He remembered the day they went waterskiing together. That was just five years ago, but now it seemed a lifetime.

  Seymour saw Sarah, the sun high and blinding in the sky, as she sank down into the water.

  He shook his head at the image of her disappearing. What was she doing right now? he wondered. Seymour’s memory of Sarah had changed—somehow she had become young again, her pale skin rosy with cold, the steam from their shared hot chocolate warming them. Seymour’s singular memory of Sarah’s bright, ebullient youth allowed him to miss her, sometimes desperately, in a way he had never thought possible. Inez, still tooling around in that Brooklyn apartment drinking Pernod and peering through her peephole at all the men who continued to visit Mae West, told her son to forget about his wife. Pretend she is dead, Inez had told him when he’d briefly let his mother in on his troubled emotions. Believe me, it is easier with the living this way, she had said. Seymour wondered had his mother, upon coming to this country all alone, willed herself to forget the Friday trips through the Marais to the fromagerie, running to get home before sunset, her mother waiting with stern hands on large hips?

  Seymour remembered the fortune-teller at Coney Island. He and Sarah had stumbled into her tent, dimly lit and thick with the scent of incense. Foreign tapestries sewn with tiny mirrors were thrown over naked lightbulbs, and Seymour could see bits of his own reflection as the gypsy looked at Sarah’s hand. A long line that is hardly visible, she’d said, tracing her finger all the way to Sarah’s wrist, lingering there until Sarah jerked her hand away. Sarah had laughed and pulled him onto the boardwalk, where they had stood, breathless beneath the stars, couples walking toward them eating funnel cakes and fried oysters, holding hands, the Ferris wheel lighted and spinning in the distance, young girls kicking their feet high in the air.

  Across the living room, Vladimir sat with a red-eyed, puffy-faced Frances on the couch.

  “But you love whitefish, Franny!” he said, trying to shove a forkful into her mouth.

  Frances clamped her mouth shut and pushed the fork away. “Stop, Vladimir,” she said. “It’s not helping.”

  “California!” he said in her ear. “Hollywood! Palm trees!”

  Frances shook her head. “Stop it,” she said.

  She had not felt this way since the day her father died. All morning she had lain with a cold compress on her head, trying to make that terrible all-over feeling go away. It stayed and stayed. Joseph was gone, yes, but everything else was gone now too. Frances knew she was being selfish, but she couldn’t help but think how her childhood had finally been wrested from her. Who else would ever remember Portia Ginsburg’s goiter? It always shook when she yelled, and all the kids thought it would explode. What was inside it? they asked one another. Still she had no idea, and now she knew it was a memory that soon would disappear.

  Frances heard the guests entering the house, whispering, shucking off wraps as if this were a party. It seemed festive, people coming in with food, bringing with them the smell of falling leaves and that crisp air that always made her sad. Time passing. The smell of the graveyard, she thought instinctively. Please tell me Esther put out the Downys and a pitcher of water so that people could wash their hands from the grave. Frances looked up from the sunken living room toward the front door, where she peered at the hands of the woman and young man entering to check for any signs of recent washing.

  Both sets of hands dry as chalk, as far as Frances could tell. She flopped back into the couch and watched the guest hand the caterer a casserole dish. Frances looked up at the woman removing the pins from her enormous hat and handing each one to the longhaired, bearded young man, who grasped a shopping bag. The woman took off her hat and shook her long brown hair free.

  “Pauline!” Frances whispered, breathing. Pauline.

  Vladimir looked up from his forkful of whitefish salad.

  Frances sat up straight and watched her sister hand her coat off and scan the room.

  Immediately Frances was the girl waiting for her sister to come pay her respects to their father.

  Without hesitation, she ran across the room to her sister and threw her arms around her. “Pauline!” she said, sobbing.

  If Pauline was shocked or alarmed by the display, she made no show of it as she hugged her younger sister close. “Franny,” she said quietly. The two women rocked back and forth for a moment. “Look at you!” Pauline said, cupping Frances’s face in her hands. “I know you from the television!”

  They both laughed, and Frances sniffed and wiped her runny nose with the back of her shirt cuff. She hugged Pauline again.

  “You were going to be the movie star!” Frances said. “Where have you been, Pauline?” she whispered.

  Pauline cleared her throat and pulled back from her sister. “Remember Wesley?” she asked.

  “Oh my goodness!” Frances looked at the young man with wild hair and an unkempt beard. She had sat with him, a two-year-old racing over and around her as she begged Solomon to invest in the Kinescope. That was the last time she’d seen her nephew. Vladimir’s television had already grown as old as this young man. “Look at you!” she said, crying again, and going to hug him. “A beatnik!” she said. Frances had never met one before. “You don’t remember me, do you?”

  “No,” Wesley said sheepishly. He brushed the hair out of his eyes with his mother’s hat pin.

  “Of course not,” she said. “Why would you?” She looked down at her toes.

  “I’ve heard a lot about you, though,” Wesley said.

  “We live in Boston,” Pauline said hurriedly.

  “Really? Is that where you’ve been all this time? Just Boston?”

  “Yes,” she said. “All these years.”

  “So close by,” Frances said softly. “I imagined you far, far away, in some place terribly exotic, like Tangiers or Bombay.” Frances had pictured her sister in a long silk caftan and heaps of jewelry, walking through a crowded marketplace.

  Pauline laughed.
“Hardly,” she said. She looked at her son. “It’s been complicated.”

  Frances’s face clouded, and she crossed her arms over her stomach. “For us all,” she said. She looked at her sister. She had thought she would never see her again. Remember everything? she’d wanted to ask her just then. “I wish I’d known,” she said.

  “Well…,” Pauline began. “In a way, we’ve been in hiding.”

  Frances nodded. How was it, after all these years of rage and then indifference and then, on some days, forgetting even, that it had all drained from her? Right now, she felt she could forgive everything.

  Vladimir came up behind her and took his wife’s hand. Pauline looked over at him.

  “This is my husband,” Frances said. “Vladimir. Remember him?”

  Pauline shook his hand. “My goodness,” she said. “I never thought I’d see you again! Not in this country.”

  “I’ve heard so much about you,” Vladimir said. “We had no idea where you were.”

  Pauline looked down. “I’ve been nearby,” she said.

  Wesley shifted the bag and held out his hand. “So nice to meet you,” he said.

  “Vladimir invented television, you know,” Frances said out of nowhere.

  “Frances,” Vladimir said.

  “I know,” Pauline said. “That’s really incredible.”

  Frances sighed, remembering why they were all there just now.

  “I brought this for Joe’s wife,” Pauline said, taking the shopping bag carefully from her son. “But I’m not sure I should give it to her. Really, I meant to give it to Joseph for so many years.” She shook her head. “I always planned to give it to him, and now, well, now I can’t.”

  Frances took the bag. “What is it?” she asked tentatively.

  Vladimir leaned in behind her and then stepped back.

  Wesley put his long hair behind his ear. “It’s my father’s tallis,” he said.

  Frances lifted the garment. It felt cold from the outside air, but for a moment she thought it was wet.

  Pauline shook her head. “Can you believe we were married beneath this?”

  “You were?”

  Pauline shook her head. “Solomon insisted on it. It was his father’s.”

  Frances covered her mouth. “It’s in a Bonwit’s bag, Pauline!”

  “Well, I don’t know what I’m supposed to carry it in!”

  Frances shook her head. She smoothed out the tangled fringes and then put the shawl back in the shopping bag.

  “You know Solomon died almost ten years ago?” Pauline said. She reached for Wesley’s hand.

  “Yes, I know,” Frances said, her anger and resolve to separate herself from her sister slowly returning. “I heard.” Pauline couldn’t have sent a note to tell her, “Hello? I’m alive. I live in Boston…”? “Solomon and I wrote to each other several times,” Frances said. “He never let me visit, though. Not once. That day in court was the last time I saw him.” She had read that he had died in prison, of natural causes. But her sister had never let her know.

  “Me too,” Pauline said. “Well, I never did visit him.” She sniffed loudly. “They don’t bury you in your tallis in prison. And I’m sure he’d made no arrangements for such a thing. You know Solomon,” she said. “But at the bottom of it all, he was a religious man. Wouldn’t be caught dead in shul, but sometimes, on high holidays, I saw him wear this, davening in that damn library he loved so much, with all those old leather books.”

  Frances nodded and pictured the short, squat Terrier somehow managing to bend toward God, who, Solomon believed until the day he died, saw everything. Everything. Old leather books. Frances had to laugh at her sister, still pretending.

  Vladimir reached out to take the package.

  “He did a lot of horrible things, I know, but…Really, I should have given this to Joe a long time ago,” Pauline said. “But I couldn’t.”

  “And to think you lived in the same town as Joseph,” Frances said. “I’ll take it. It will only upset Esther right now.”

  Pauline nodded.

  “So tell me, Pauline. What have you been doing?”

  Pauline took her sister’s hand. “When I tell you,” she said, “you will be very surprised.”

  “Really,” Frances said flatly. I am going to Hollywood, she thought to herself, a mantra. There will be sunny sidewalks pasted with silver stars, long sunsets in Malibu, a balcony that hangs over a beach, a cliff, a terrace facing away from here. Good night, sweet darling, I’ll say in the movies, as I lean down to kiss my daughter good night.

  “I had to become someone else. I just had to,” Pauline said.

  “What about before Solomon went to prison? You had to leave us behind then?” Frances’s throat tightened as it had already so many times today. Her goodwill toward her sister had dissipated.

  “That was different,” Pauline said. “You all hated me after I went off with Sol.”

  “I was sixteen, Pauline. I didn’t hate you.”

  Pauline was quiet.

  “Sixteen,” Frances said again. “I hated you when I turned seventeen.”

  Frances smiled at Wesley, the way she had done over thirty years ago when she had marched by her sister without even saying hello. Just then, she realized she did not want to know where her sister had been for the last twenty-nine years. Or more, she did not want to know her sister. “It’s so nice to see you again,” she said to her nephew.

  Frances took Vladimir’s hand and led him down the hallway and into the den, leaving Wesley and Pauline in the foyer alone, looking out onto a house of mourning.

  The night of the funeral, after they all had sat and leaned their heads toward the rabbi, saying Kaddish, and after they had eaten more cakes and cookies and tuna salad than they could possibly bear, Miriam pulled David aside.

  “Let’s take a drive,” she said.

  Miriam imagined driving to Sebago Lake, to the house she had gone to each summer since she was a girl. She imagined pulling the MiriGlo from the shed where it was stored for the season and, with all her strength, dragging it off its wooden stilts, over the yard, and into the soft water. She wanted to drive the boat out into the lake and lie beneath the stars tonight, feel the soft ripple of the water swish against the boat.

  “Whatever you want to do,” David said.

  Sebago was too far. Miriam led David to the garage and pulled down a flashlight as big as a drainpipe from a metal shelf in the garage. They got into Joseph’s Oldsmobile—her father’s smell of leather, perspiration, and Essoil caught David by surprise, but he thought better of telling Miriam, who he knew couldn’t smell a thing—and Miriam pulled the car out of the driveway, down to Baxter Boulevard, and over the wooden bridge to Mackworth Island, which her father had talked so much about when he first moved to Portland. The few times she’d come to visit, Miriam would always walk with him along the rocky shore. This is a bay, Joseph would say. Salt water. An estuary, he’d tell her proudly.

  We should have visited more often, she thought.

  “Where are we going?” David asked.

  The old wooden slats of the bridge creaked beneath the car, and Miriam opened the windows. Salt air spilled in. Lights and water flanked both sides of the car.

  “Mackworth,” she said. It was the next best thing.

  Miriam liked the place best in the rain, the sky overcast as she and Joseph made their way along the seaweed- and barnacle-covered rocks, the water a deep green against the light gray sky. It would be nearly empty, but for a woman shelling in a yellow slicker, a bearded man and his Irish setter, the dog’s shining red coat flashing in and out of the trees along the trail above the shore. Seagulls would swoop down, calling to one another, and Miriam always felt like a young girl again, walking toward the cotton candy stand at Old Orchard.

  When they got to the lot, the gate was closed, so they pulled up as far as they could and parked. Miriam hesitated.

  “It’s pretty dark out, Miri,” David said. “Do you thin
k we should go in?”

  “I want to,” she said.

  They slid under the barrier.

  Sweeping the light over the ground, Miriam and David tried to find a path down to the water’s edge. Miriam couldn’t locate one, but, noticing the trail that wound above the shore, she led them along that, leaves rustling in the night wind.

  When they found rocks leading to the shore, they scrambled down them until sand crunched under their sneakers. “Ouch,” Miriam said, dropping the flashlight as she hit her shin on a rock.

  David picked it up and scanned it over the sand and into the water, which made a gentle, lapping sound. The lighthouse beacon flashed, and the town rose and blinked across the black water.

  They found a flat rock and sat down on it, wrapping their arms around their legs. David turned off the flashlight so that Miriam could not see him, and she put her head sideways on the table of her knees, closed her eyes. The salt air, the rippling water, darkness, surrounded them.

  David pulled at Miriam’s jacket from the back, and she lay down next to her husband, looking up at the sky—black—more black than the water, stars everywhere. She blinked from the brightness of them all. It was so unlike New York, where a gorgeous night in the city is a starless one, its beauty in the flash and blink of skyscraper lights skimming into fog, or in the liquid movement of headlights and taillights viewed from above.

  Everything felt as if it was falling away.

  Miriam put her hands in front of her and could see them only in the silhouette they made as they blocked out the lighted sky. She could see each of her fingers as she spread them apart above her head. And then she saw the outline of David’s hands against the stars. She reached up to touch them, a peace offering: We make peace and now, please now, we grow up. It was the first time in so long she had not wanted to hurt him.