The Melting Pot

by Lynne Sharon Schwartz

  “Our house was the place where all immigrants stopped first,” he says. “And no matter how crowded we were, when they opened the door, whoever came in I welcomed them with open arms. I was only a child. But I felt the call of blood.”

  Open arms. He lives, Rita comes to understand, by appropriation. He takes in, processes, categorizes, labels, and provides a commentary. To have any act unexplained or unexcused, anyone left out of the scheme, can put the world in an imbalanced state, as taunting and intolerable as an unresolved chord in his singer’s ear.

  So he narrates the fortunes of each arrival, one by one: loves, travels, business ventures, progeny. And in his stories—long, highly dramatized, and gripping—never a harsh word is spoken between sister and brother, parent and child, husband and wife, only happy grateful immigrants making good in the promised land, learning the customs and the lingo. He has an instinctive way of skimming over pain or crisis, alighting mostly on moments of epiphany when generosity and breadth of spirit are revealed, moments when virtue triumphs over self-interest. What everyone fled from is never mentioned above a whisper, and never at all in the presence of “them,” the others, the ones who can never be trusted, who pursue and destroy. The moral is always the same: The family is the pillar of society. There are no distinctions when it comes to family. A cousin? “Like my own brother!” (A granddaughter? “Like my own daughter!”) And when a member strays beyond the pillars he becomes an outcast. Formerly appropriated, now vomited up.

  Since Sol’s stories extol righteousness, Rita asks why, then, he and his brother don’t go out, this minute, and work for civil rights and for an end to the war in Vietnam. If they fled from the draft on one continent, shouldn’t they protest it on another? Sol listens because she is a clever speaker, and when she becomes too annoying he waves her away like a mosquito. Her uncle the dentist points out that all the boys in the immediate neighborhood are going to college, not Asia. Once, her great-aunt, the dentist’s wife, loses patience. “Protest, protest!” she mocks, eyeing Rita as she would a stranger who has jumped the line at the bakery. “She should be glad she has a roof over her head.”

  What could it mean? Rita knows her parents are ... well ... dead, it must be. The subject is taboo. It is as if she is Sol’s and Sonia’s child. This is her roof, isn’t it? Her grandfather tells his sister-in-law to shut her big mouth. Sonia goes further and throws her out of the house, and the incident is closed. Everyone goes to bed with a headache.

  Undaunted, at fourteen years old Rita thinks she too can appropriate the world, make it over to fit her vision. Not all immigrants are so well assimilated, she finds out. She feels for those beyond the pillars, maybe because she is darker than any Jew she knows and has never had a chance to play Queen Esther. With an adolescent’s passion to convert, she wants her grandfather to feel for them too, and to agree that breadth of spirit does not mean obeying the most rules but scorning them all, except for the rules of the heart. She wants him to thrill to the uneven rhythms of heroic outcasts, anarchists: “I might have lived out my life talking at street corners, to scorning men. I might have died unmarked, unknown, a failure. Now we are not a failure. This is our career and our triumph. Never in our full life could we hope to do so much work for tolerance, for justice, for man’s understanding of man as we do now by accident. Our words—our lives—our pains—nothing! The taking of our lives—lives of a good shoemaker and a poor fish-peddler—all! That last moment belongs to us—that agony is our triumph!” She finds this in a book about famous trials of the century, and shivers with passion.

  But Solomon hears it impassively, and in response, launches into one of his own speeches—clears his throat and prepares his oratorical voice. “Ours, Rita, is a religion of ethics. A man’s devotion to God is shown in how he treats his fellow man, beginning with his own—his children, his grandchildren”—he smiles fondly, justly pleased with himself on this score—“his neighbors.” (Sonia puts down the skirt she is hemming, tosses aside her glasses and stalks out of the room.) “In other words, mamaleh, charity begins at home.”

  Very well, and where is home? Everywhere, she lectures him in turn. He calls her a bleeding heart. Whatever he cannot appropriate, whatever refuses to go down and be assimilated—outsiders, heinous deeds, gross improprieties—he ignores, which means it ceases to exist.

  He has been unable to appropriate, for instance, his son’s marriage to a Mexican immigrant, which took place in far-off San Francisco, California, in 1955. This Rita learns through piecing together family whispers. If Sol had had his way, ostracism—the tool of his enemies—would not have sufficed; according to the rules, his son would have been interred in absentia and mourned for a week, and neighbors would have visited him and Sonia while they sat on wooden boxes, wearing bedroom slippers, with the mirrors in the house covered by bed sheets. But he didn’t have his way. Sonia refused to do it. It was the beginning of her refusals.

  That her mother was Mexican is one of four or five facts Rita knows about her. Her name was Carmen. She was a singer—strangely enough, like Rita’s grandfather, but singing a different kind of song. Rita would like to know what kind of love her parents had and how they came to marry, but she never will. It was certainly not arranged.

  Rita’s dream foresees her grandfather’s funeral because he is not well, Sanjay suggests reasonably. Perhaps; she shrugs. She is not really seeking explanations. It is certainly true that Sol’s fears have caught up with him, and that there are not enough rules to cover them adequately. Once sturdy, he has become in old age what he calls “nervous.” He sees death coming, and his nervous system is in a twit. He has spells of weakness, shortness of breath, panic; all activities have to be gauged in advance as to how taxing they will be and the chance of mishaps. He monitors his vital signs with loving care, as solicitous of himself as a mother. The path has narrowed till on the vast new continent there is hardly room to place one foot in front of the other. Safe, safe. Rita hates the way he lives. She wants him to get up and do something—sing, pray, sell sportswear, anything but pave the way for death, be the advance man.

  But for safety he must keep himself as confined as possible, especially since Rita and Sonia have slipped out of his control. He would not be so “nervous,” he claims, if he could oversee what they were doing at all times. Of course, this cannot be. Rita is far away, doing God knows what and with whom, and Sonia has to manage the store. Sonia began to elude him long ago anyhow. For the first three decades of their marriage she obeyed, and then something happened. It was as if she had sealed up her disobedience the way pioneer women canned fruits and vegetables for a later season, and then she broke it out in abundance, jar after jar releasing its briny fumes. Years ago, members of the congregation reported that they saw the cantor’s wife, her granddaughter beside her, driving his car on the Sabbath, a cigarette in her invincible teeth! Where could they be going? There was even talk of replacing him, but it came to nothing—they pitied him, first his great tragedy with his son and now unable to control his family.

  Sonia, once tame, has reverted to the ways of her family. Anarchists, though not the grand kind. No, they fit very well into the elastic New World. Except that they argue passionately with the clerks of bureaucracies, they walk on the grass, they refuse to wait on lines, they smoke in nonsmoking areas, they open doors labeled authorized personnel only, they zip through traffic jams on the shoulders of roads or in lanes blocked off by orange stanchions. It is part of their passion, their brand of civil disobedience. Sol is horrified and Rita is amused, even though these are gestures only, to show they will not take the law from anyone, for they know who the lawgivers are. Clay like all the rest. They obey what they like, laws unto themselves. They are in fact (some of them, at any rate) lawyers. They came here in installments, three boys and three girls from Kiev. The girls became seamstresses, the boys lawyers. The girls went to factories, to sit on a cushion and sew a fine seam, while the boys were sent to school—the New World not so unlike the
Old in that regard.

  Three dressmakers make three lawyers: stitch, stitch. The dressmakers live in small apartments in Jewish ghettos with their husbands, small businessmen like Rita’s grandfather, while their brothers prosper in modern assimilated suburbs. Then in 1959, the only child—a son—of one of the girls is stabbed to death in far-off San Francisco, California. That is truly lawless. The family, convulsed, will grieve in unison. That is not the kind of lawlessness, the kind of anarchy they intended, no, never, never! His mother will stop recognizing the world, any world. New, Old, all the same to her.

  The family fears she may never return to the realm of the living. Days go by while she sits on a hard kitchen chair with her eyes fixed on nothing. She will not change her clothing or eat or sleep. When spoken to she will not respond, or else shakes her head, or at the most says, “Not now.” It seems she is waiting for something, someone. Perhaps she is remembering how she refused to mourn her son when he married out of his faith—was it for this, so she could mourn him now?

  Meanwhile her husband, accompanied by his twin brother the dentist, will fly out to the unknown western territories to settle his son’s affairs and see that justice is done—a most adventurous trip, which he would not undertake for any other reason, but shock has made him a father again. The former outcast as a corpse is unobjectionable. And what, of all things, will he discover in the shadow of the Golden Gate but a child! Just two years old. If he had known, maybe ... The child has been staying with her maternal uncle and his wife (her mother being in no condition to take care of her), but really, it is very difficult. They own a bar, a nightclub, actually—he is the bartender, his wife the waitress. (And there Rita’s mother sang her Spanish songs. A vision in sequins? A floozy? She will never know.) No place for a baby. Without a moment’s hesitation, Solomon transcends himself (possibly for the baby’s blue eyes, which reflect his own), to perform the one daring act of his life—he takes her back. He takes her in. It is an act that could speak best for itself, but he cannot resist the ready phrase, a Jewish Polonius.

  “It was the call of blood,” he explains to Sonia as he enters carrying the child on one arm, suitcase and briefcase dangling from the other. She stares at him in the stupor that has become her mode of existence. Nothing surprises her. “Here,” he says more naturally, holding out his burden like an offering. “Better take her to the bathroom. Her name is Rita.” He thrusts her at Sonia. “Take a look at her eyes. Like skies.”

  A good name, Rita. It can derive from either set of genes. And there are plenty of dark Jews, her grandfather will declaim, presenting her to the family and the neighbors, the little bilingual prodigy. Yemenites. Ethiopians. The sons of Ham. Anyway, she is not all that dark. Some regular Jews are swarthy. Anyway, there she is, and her grandmother takes her to the bathroom, feeds her, clothes her, and lo, a miracle sprung from tragedy, Sonia returns to life like Sarah in Genesis, fertilized in old age. Soon the neighborhood women start coming back to the house for fittings. They stand stiffly, only their mouths moving, as she pins folds of fabric around them, the pins stuck in her tough teeth. Rita plays with dolls at their feet, and not all her dolls are blonde. One is quite dark, with glossy black hair—Sonia understands the demands of a pluralistic society. That doll is not Rita’s best baby, however. Her best baby is a blue-eyed blonde she calls Nita, to rhyme. The clients fuss over her, how cute, how bright, congratulate her grandmother on this unexpected boon, but their tone is very odd, not utterly pure. Ambiguous, like Rita.

  For Sonia, though, there is no ambiguity. She accepts their goodwill with nonchalance—the pins in her mouth make it hard to speak in any case—and in their presence ignores Rita. When they leave she clasps her close, then talks, talks, low and fast like someone who has saved up words over a lifetime. She talks as if she is talking to herself—much of it a small child can hardly understand. So many things that she thinks and feels, but not the one thing. Of Rita’s parents she never speaks, but she returns to life, and best of all, learns to drive. She neglects the housework that exasperates her, and together they breeze through the tangled city like tourists. Even when Rita is a big schoolgirl, she will wait for her and greet her at the door at three-fifteen: “Let’s take a ride, okay?”

  They ride through exotic neighborhoods of Greeks, Asians, blacks, Hispanics, Russians—there they eat pirogen and caviar and borscht. A passionately discontented woman, angular and veiny, Sonia is most content at the wheel of the dark green Pontiac. A born voyager. Short, straight-backed, she sits on a pillow and stretches her neck like a swan to peruse the traffic. Her driving style is aggressive, arrogant, anarchic. And Rita by her side is her natural passenger. Nothing can shock or frighten her, so thoroughly does she trust her grandmother, so closely are they twined, having accepted each other on first sight with no questions asked, like Sanjay’s parents—neither the U-turns in tunnels nor the sprinting across intersections nor the sparring with buses and trucks. Sonia is omnipotent, fearless. Queen of the Road. Defying the rules about the Sabbath, she takes Rita to, of all places, the beach, where in all kinds of weather they wet their feet in the surf and build sand castles and Sonia tells stories—not morality tales like Sol’s but true stories without morals—of what lies across the openness of the Atlantic, and she tells Rita that they came here to be free, free.

  Now Rita longs for those forbidden afternoons at the edge of the Atlantic. Like a child, she would like to incorporate her grandmother, swallow her, as her grandfather lived by appropriating. Appropriation is the tactic of the lost and the scared. Oh, if only Rita could swallow her whole, if only she would go down, she could have Sonia forever with her. Safe at last. Then she would never clutch her heart and die as in the nightmare, leaving Rita standing alone, severed.

  While Sanjay and Rita are watching a Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers movie on television one evening, her phone rings. Rita speaks to her friend who still works in the Spanish record store in the Mission district. When she hangs up she says, “I’ve just been invited to a wedding. Rosalia’s brother Luis. Would you like to come?”

  “I never knew you could speak Spanish like that.” They have been lovers for almost a year.

  “Oh. Well, I need it, you know, for my clients.”

  “But you speak it like a native. I thought you were only two years old ...”

  “I learned when I was in college. Do you want to go to the wedding? It’ll be fun. Lots of music and dancing.”

  “Sure.”

  She sits down and touches his hand. “I used to go out with her brother, years ago. He’s very nice. Gentle, you know, like Rosalia. I’m glad he’s getting married.”

  “You never mentioned it before.”

  “Well, it was nothing, really. We were kids. There’s no way it should bother you.”

  “It doesn’t. Only I sometimes realize I know so little about you. You tell me so little.”

  Sanjay develops an interest in her past loves. Like her curiosity about his wife, his is not lascivious in nature. Rather, he wants coherent social history. What has her life been all about? And generically, what are young American women’s lives all about? a question that has never occupied him before.

  She is not a typical case, Rita tries to explain. But it’s a matter of optics, of the precision of the lens. To a fifty-year-old naturalized Indian widower, she is representative enough. He wants his American girl, Rita thinks. And he wants the real thing.

  “Did you ever sleep with any of your clients?”

  “No! Anyway, by the time I had clients I already knew you.”

  “Well, what about at law school?”

  “One student.” She grins, teasing. “One professor.”

  “A professor!”

  “Is there any more paratha?”

  Sanjay reaches for the plate on the floor. “Yes, but they’re cold by now.”

  All during these absurd conversations they eat his daughter’s food. Rita feels funny about that, but Sanjay says nonsense, his daughter made
it to be enjoyed. Food is for whoever is hungry.

  “I don’t mind them cold. Thanks. You’ll be relieved to know I wasn’t in his class at the time.”

  “But a law professor. A jurist! He must have been so much older.”

  “He was seven years older, Sanjay. What about you?”

  “I may be old, but at least I’m pure!” He laughs loud belly laughs. His whole body shakes. The bed shakes. Rita feels safe, wrapped up warm in his laughter. He is so domesticated, so easy to entertain. Pure: he says he never knew any women besides his wife. Before he was married, two prostitutes. They don’t count.

  “We’d better start at the beginning. What about in college?”

  “This is getting very silly. Stop.”

  “Aha! Now we’re getting somewhere.”

  “Just Luis, for a while.”

  “Why a Chicano?”

  “Why not? Now stop. Really. It’s annoying.”

  “Because there’s something you’re not telling me. Why won’t you marry me? You’re footloose. Then you’d know where you belong.”

  The Indian gentleman next door wants to rescue the poor orphan girl, give her food and warm clothes and light a fire in her garret. And she would not be cast out if she married him, as her father was. It’s thirty years later. And it’s Rita. What can you expect? They are prepared for almost anything from her. They believe in nature, not nurture, and she believes with them.

  But she has never told anyone. She shakes her head.

  “Is it terrible?” Sanjay asks. He is not fooling around anymore. She sees his age in the set of his face. His lips are parted. His cheeks are sagging in a kind of resigned expectation.

  “Yes.”

  He hands her more stuffed bread. “Well, eat something while you tell me, then.” To her surprise, his eyes, however old and sympathetic, have turned lustful. He is waiting to hear about a frenzied, tragic love affair. Rita stares right into them as she speaks.