Golden Country

by Jennifer Gilmore

  “I’m pregnant,” she said.

  David hooked his pinkie to hers, and Miriam turned toward him. She buried her head in his chest, and he could feel the warmth of her crying through his windbreaker.

  After a moment, Miriam wiped her eyes and sat up. David turned on the flashlight, shining it along the water’s surface. Miriam imagined he was looking across the bay to spot her parents’ house. She imagined it bathed in starlight, her father walking up the front steps, opening the door, a rectangle of light, home.

  Zhis is zhe driftvood. And here, a piece of sea glass, smoothed over by sand and vater. By time. You vant to hold it? Here. Hold it, Joseph had told her when they’d walked together here not so long ago. Her father had cupped a hand over Miriam’s shoulder. Look quick. Your island, he’d said, his rough fingertips pressing lightly at his daughter’s collarbone. Goldene medina! Golden country, he’d said, and Miriam had looked out across the water searching for that tiny flash of her parents’ house.

  “That’s wonderful,” David said.

  Children. He imagined a little girl running toward him in a swirl of yellow leaves. She wore a red coat. She had huge eyes and pigtails.

  “What would you have done if your mother said yes?” Miriam asked after a few moments of silence.

  “Yes to what?”

  “Would you have gotten her those pills, David?”

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  “So you would have killed your own mother?” Miriam rubbed her forehead.

  “I’m not sure,” David said. “But I might have helped her along if it had been what she’d wanted.” He saw his mother in that torn, yellowed dress, walking toward him like Dickens’s Miss Havisham in that horrible shining hallway, scrubbed with Essoil, he imagined, until it gleamed. “But the point is, I suppose, that she’s happy now. Now she doesn’t want to die.”

  “I think it’s just awful,” Miriam said. “I can’t imagine ever doing such a thing.” She remembered looking out the window on her wedding night: What will my life be like? she had thought. It was what she always thought, as if she was not now living.

  “Well then, you didn’t know her,” he said. Was it awful? He would want his child to do the same for him. A child. They were going to be parents.

  David and Miriam sat together, the water lapping quietly along the shore. After a few minutes, he stood and reached for his wife’s hand, and she stood up, following him along the sand. When they finally felt their way back, David got in the driver’s seat. As they were leaving, Miriam turned to see the school above the parking lot, two people silhouetted in a third-floor window, gesturing to each other in the soft orange light. Their hands moved quickly and delicately.

  As they drove away, Miriam twisted in her seat to watch the island recede into the black sky and water, and then disappear.

  Silently, they headed back to the house. Miriam remembered her father making room for her at the wheel. Go ahead, sugar, he had said to her. You drive for a vhile. She was thinking of the way she had put the boat into gear and it had lurched ahead, nosing the water and then tipping them all backward. Joseph had put his hands over his daughter’s, and she remembered the tanned skin of his fingers as he guided her hands and the boat into first gear.

  When they got back, most of the people were gone, and Miriam went straight into Esther’s bedroom to kiss her good night.

  Her mother was seated on the edge of her bed.

  As Miriam switched on the vanity light, the naked lightbulbs, screwed into clouded crystal shells, illuminated photographs of Miriam and Gloria in all the stages of their lives, Gloria’s two children, and a tiny picture of Esther and Joseph holding their hats and walking down the boardwalk at Coney Island, framed in gold.

  “Are you okay, Mom?” she asked.

  “Did I ever tell you about our honeymoon?”

  “About the anti-Semitism?” Miriam asked. Her mother had told her the story close to a million times. Be sure they know who you are when you go, she always warned. Because when you get there, they’ll let you know anyway.

  “Well, yes, there was that, that was just awful, but that’s not what I mean,” Esther said. “I’m talking about how I went to the bathroom in the hall, all dressed up in my fancy-schmancy lingerie, and then I couldn’t remember which room was ours. I tried every door down the hallway looking for our room.”

  Miriam laughed.

  “You know, that’s what I thought of when that doctor called,” Esther said. “Isn’t that strange? Me in my silly old nightie, scratching on every damn door looking for Joseph. That’s the first thing I thought of when the doctor called to say he hadn’t made it through.” Esther leaned back and looked blankly at the ceiling.

  Miriam lay next to her mother on the tiny twin bed. She brought her mother’s hand to her chest and remembered a time she had lain with Esther on this bed, turning the pages of one of Esther’s scrapbooks. Their legs had kicked in the air, and Esther had told her daughter, I had so many boyfriends. I was boy crazy, she’d said. Boy meshuge. Oh, I loved him, Esther had said of a photo of young man in a suit, his hair slicked back. And him. She pointed to a boy in a lifeguard’s outfit, his nose and cheeks smeared with zinc oxide. When they had turned to a photograph of the man in a tweed hat on a cobbled city street, his eyes tiny points of dark light, quietly, she said, But he was the one. Her finger had poked his nose and then traced the line of Joseph’s lapel.

  “I’m pregnant, Mom,” Miriam said suddenly.

  Esther grabbed her hand away from Miriam’s. And then she put it back.

  “That’s wonderful, Miri,” she said. “It’s too bad your father will never know. But I will say this: it’s about time. We were all beginning to wonder.”

  “I don’t know why I didn’t tell him,” Miriam said. A knot, a tight fist, a ball of bones and teeth and hair, a planet was growing inside Miriam, and she had known it now for weeks.

  “Because you didn’t know it was the last time you would talk to him, is why,” Esther said.

  Miriam leaned into her mother’s shoulder, grateful that she had not said what she had meant. She had wished she had given her father more of a reason to get through as well.

  “You know I will be a better grandmother than I have been a mother,” Esther said. “It is the way it always goes, you know.”

  “You’ve been a good mom,” Miriam said. She remembered driving into Naples for soft serve and to watch the water planes land. Esther had told her that she would never get in one of those planes, not a chance, but that Miriam would be going farther than these could ever take her. Just you wait, her mother had said, licking her cone. “You have,” Miriam said.

  Miriam thought of herself as a little girl watching television and wondering what her life would be like. Women of the future will clean the moon with Essoil! Now that future was upon her. A future that did not contain her father. She pictured herself leaning over a pram. She imagined tying a child’s shoe.

  Miriam closed her eyes and prayed for a boy. When she opened them, David was standing before her.

  “How are you ladies doing?” he asked. He held the evening paper folded beneath his arm.

  Miriam nodded.

  “You’ll never believe this,” he said, handing the paper to Miriam. “‘Dear Maggie’ is about Joseph.”

  “‘Dear Maggie’?” Esther tore the paper from Miriam. “I can’t believe I didn’t read it today.”

  “Well, she was here,” David said.

  “Here?” Miriam asked.

  “Here!” he said.

  Miriam and Esther tugged at the paper and then, placing it between them, looked on together:

  Dear Reader:

  When an editor approached me over twenty-five years ago in a dentist’s office upon seeing an article I’d written on how women should prepare themselves financially for the deaths of their husbands, I had no idea what it would lead to. “Dear Maggie” began as women writing to one another, sharing intimate secrets under the cloak of
anonymity. But this changed as the world changed.

  Such dark times we have lived through.

  It seemed important to have answers. To have order. And etiquette gives us both.

  All these years of a manners column and I have completely forgotten mine. I will see my old friend laid out today. I grew up with him. I was married to his brother. We lived in the same town for two decades and I never once paid him a visit. I have not paid anyone a visit for over thirty years. Joseph Brodsky is no longer here to refuse my apology or to forgive me, but you, Reader, still are. I hope that you will.

  When you discover who I am, I may no longer be of use to you. Will you take such advice from someone like me? If that is the case, may I just say that it has been a glorious twenty-nine years spent alone with you and your letters. A lovely stint to be trusted to dispense my humble advice.

  Sincerely,

  Maggie

  “I’ll be damned,” said Esther, throwing down the paper. “I’ll be goddamned.”

  “Wait,” Miriam said. “I thought Daddy’s brother died in the war.”

  “What war, Miriam?” Esther asked, sighing heavily. “What war would that have been?”

  Miriam was silent. “Well, who is it?” she asked.

  “I suppose it’s Frances’s sister,” Esther said. “In any case, the column stinks now.”

  “It really does,” Miriam said. “I don’t care about when to wear short gloves and when to wear long ones.”

  “I know you don’t,” Esther said. “But you should. Anyway, did you see her?”

  “I did,” David said. “Gorgeous. Very well dressed, with that big hat and the trumpet skirt. She was with her son. A real beatnik. They said hello to you.”

  “I can’t remember a thing,” Esther said quietly. “‘Dear Maggie.’ You just never know. Taking advice from a criminal—” She got up from her bed in midsentence.

  “She wasn’t a criminal,” Miriam said.

  “No?” Esther asked her daughter. “Do you know who she was married to?”

  “Now I do,” Miriam said.

  “Well, I hate to be the one to tell you, but your uncle was not a good man. Joseph is probably turning and turning to hear me say it—and on the day of his burial—well, but it is true. A real thug, that man.”

  David braced himself for the next comment.

  “You know he did business with your father, don’t you?” Esther said to David.

  “Hmm,” he said. “Well—”

  “But you know what’s really criminal,” she interrupted. “All these years. A Jew from Brooklyn telling me how to behave like a lady. That’s criminal,” she said. “You know once I wrote a letter to her, and she printed it.” Esther stood up and looked into the vanity.

  “Me too!” Miriam said. “I remember—”

  “Will you look at my hair?” Esther patted it down. “The way I’m dressed, you’d think I was coming from a funeral.”

  Miriam left her mother’s bedroom when she heard Frances scream from the living room.

  “What?” she screamed. “Who?” she said as David held out the paper.

  Frances leaned on Vladimir. “It’s preposterous,” she said. And she had fallen for it. Her sister was the better actress after all. Frances took her hand from her husband’s shoulder. “How could she?”

  “But what has she done really?” her husband asked. “I’m just wondering. It seemed she was a ghost and she needed to find a way to live as a ghost.”

  Hollywood, thought Frances. Sunset Boulevard. My face on an enormous screen. “But that’s what I did,” she said. “Don’t you remember?” She pictured Etta’s cruel, toothless smile, her right hand curled around a pen: the past. Frances thought of all those people lining up in Brooklyn to tell her their lies. Day after day, she took down their elaborate fantasies like dictation. Still she could hear the clinking, coins dropping into her mother’s glass jar. Frances had hated the sound of money, and yet she had feared that one day she would wake up and no one would pay her for writing down his dreams. Clink clink. It was the only sound that made her mother smile.

  “And you no longer do this,” Vladimir said. “It’s been over thirty years. Who cares?”

  Frances crossed her arms. “Well, it was my idea,” she said.

  “Yes, it was,” he answered.

  “She steals everything,” Frances said. She thought of her sister now, alone in an apartment, letters from loyal readers stacked to the moon. “What do you think will happen now?” she asked her husband. Would her sister be killed? Jailed? Or did anyone even remember the Terrier and all the gangsters who went down after him, a row of evil men, falling like dominoes? She recalled Tom Dewey’s mustache growing and growing until it twisted into curlicues at the sides.

  “My dear,” Vladimir said, putting his arm around Frances and bringing her close. “Don’t you think enough’s enough? Everything has already happened.”

  David had to get back to All American, and Miriam was expected to attend that United Nations conference, so the couple left Portland two days after Joseph’s funeral. Frances was horrified when she heard they would be going. There are still five more days of the shiva, she’d said. And you are the elder daughter! For her father, Frances had sat straight in silence, in a room of covered mirrors, the neighborhood clucking at her for a whole week. She had gone to minyan and not been counted. Frances did not want the mourning to end; it would mean that everything was over.

  But Esther pooh-poohed Frances. “I’m not sitting here for seven days,” she said. “I’ll go mad. And I’ll get even fatter than I was before Joe died.” She thumped her burgeoning stomach.

  Frances looked at Esther with wide, judging eyes and stomped off into the kitchen for some more of that delicious crumb cake, already half eaten, that Rita Shore had brought only yesterday.

  Esther put her hand to the rim of the dark glasses she still wore in the house to receive visitors. “Does this mean she’s staying for the next week?” she asked Miriam. “Jeesum Crow,” she said, but she was smiling.

  Frances and Esther came out front, arms crossed at their waists, to see Miriam and David drive away.

  Miriam watched until her mother and Frances disappeared. They drove in silence. Towns whizzed by: Portland, Old Orchard, Kennebunkport, Kittery, then over the green bridge to Portsmouth. Then the now-familiar names that had replaced the landmarks of her childhood—Mamaroneck and Pelham—signs to towns, illuminated beneath the rising moon. The Indian names made Miriam think of the trading post with the big wooden Indian out in front of Levinsky’s in Freeport, where Esther had bought Miriam and her sister moccasins with beads sewn in like rays of the sun.

  Miriam turned toward her husband, catching a glimpse of his profile as she had her mother’s all those years ago on the way to get her new nose—or more to lose the old one—in New York. Her mother’s face had brought her comfort that day—she remembered that it had, because it had been so shocking to her. This is my mother, she’d thought, as if for the very first time. Now, as David stared straight ahead at the road, his contours somehow became her own. She had once looked at her mother and recognized herself. She looked at her husband and not only saw him but actually was him. The family you are born to and the family you choose, she thought to herself.

  A crescent moon dangled in the sky as if on a wire. Manhattan was spread out before Miriam and David, winking in the distance. Joseph had always told her: Look at zhe lights, zhe lights! And the Empire State, he’d told her. Built just for you. Don’t you vant to put the skyline in your little pocket, sugar? Here, he’d say, pretending to scoop it up and hand it to his daughter. She had wanted to keep it. She had wanted to put it in that time capsule at the World’s Fair the day her father showed her television. What else had she wanted to keep? Now she wished for a tape of her father’s voice, those dried bits of skin, his Irving Berlin scores. Miriam pictured her mother at the kitchen table, fingering the yellow tablecloth, alone. She looked at David again. A lock of hi
s hair, his kiss, a black-eyed Susan, the Chanel gown he loved to watch her zip up the side. When had she not known him?

  David watched the road ahead as they headed down the FDR, toward the turnoff to his parents’ house. But now of course it was only his father. He could picture his mother tearing through her room, the black embroidered silk robe flying out behind her. His mother at the top of the stairs, singing. “They say that falling in love is wonderful. It’s wonderful. So they say.”

  David looked over at Miriam, who now turned toward the window. Her hair was tied back in a black ribbon, and he could see the nape of her neck, as he had the first time he’d met her, in college. Miriam Brodsky. He wanted to preserve this image of her now, headlights flashing over her features, briefly illuminating her pale, turned face as a flashbulb does, forever, in that time capsule he had seen with his father at the World’s Fair. That had been an astounding day, one of the few he’d spent alone with his father. This is hope, son, his father had told him. This is tomorrow. Now David reached for Miriam’s hand and squeezed it, and she turned toward him, her face somehow a reflection of his own grief. He smiled at his wife and looked down at her stomach.

  At that moment David wanted to write a letter to his child. Before she came into this world red-faced and screaming, he wanted to say something. Say everything. What would that be, and how would it ever be enough?

  He looked ahead at the skyline. They had become adults suddenly, only just this moment. The city got closer and closer as they drove along the river, until Miriam and David were in it, surrounded by the uptown buildings and lighted windows, the honking taxis, streetlights.

  What will I write? The Brooklyn Bridge hovered in the distance, strung with a million lights. David Bloom turned west, away from the river, toward the park, toward home. I want to be a good father, he thought. I hope that I won’t disappoint you.