by Joan Silber
Rhoda’s own family all spoke loudly and quickly, vying for each other’s attention, so that the din at family gatherings was often overwhelming. A clan of story-tellers, both of Rhoda’s brothers could imitate, do accents, stretch a joke until it burst at the punch line—so that telling stories was for them what singing together is supposed to be for some families. For Leonard, speech had a different function; his words were always “well-chosen” he could argue current events like a news analyst, debate religion, even pun with a soft playfulness, but it was clear that the real issues of his life were kept safe from the conversation at the dinner table, although it was never apparent, perhaps not even to him, what these were.
Rhoda had been puzzling for years over the question of whether there was any hidden scorn in his guardedness: there didn’t seem to be, but she wasn’t sure. At the last Thanksgiving dinner he had been especially quiet. Her brother Frank (on leave from an army base in Texas, where he had a desk job) was horsing around with her brother Andy (Andy “commuted to war” at Brewster Aeronautical in Newark). Frank was rather childishly dropping roast potatoes onto Andy’s plate, saying, “Bombs over Tokyo!” while Andy put on his Jap accent and hissed through his teeth, “Okay, you Yankee doodle dandy, do your worst.” He sucked back his lower lip to simulate an over-bite he considered oriental.
Leonard—who argued with great feeling against the Nisei camps in California and hated to hear anyone even use the word “Nip” in front of him—didn’t seem annoyed; he seemed, if anything, faintly amused. But then he was seldom really frustrated when people didn’t agree with him. Other people’s fatuousness didn’t ruffle or surprise him. He seemed regulated by an intense patience.
They had plenty of money now, although there wasn’t much they wanted to buy from the range of goods available. Even the smallest things—lipstick in cardboard tubes instead of metal—seemed designed to last only for the Duration. At times Rhoda found herself mending and substituting, as though they were poorer than they were. She spent hours canning fruits and vegetables—wax beans, purple plums, things they never ate; rows of jars lined the shelves in the basement, which was where you were supposed to put things for safety in case of attack. The whole house had a feeling of plenty lying in wait. There was a spare bedroom ready for the next child, drawers filled with banquet-size tablecloths, never unfolded.
Rhoda felt completely secure in the house, although Leonard pointed out that it had too many doors—front, back, side—plus exposed windows to the cellar on the driveway side, so that it would be easy for burglars to enter. It was a large, substantial house, a bulky Dutch Colonial, and it had been a good buy, but it was old and full of hidden flaws—termites once—and the plumbing was faulty.
“You know how interested Suzanne is,” Rhoda said one evening, as she and Leonard listened to the news on the radio, “in putting the little pail inside the bigger pail and finding the piece for her big wooden puzzle. With all that mechanical ability, do you think she could learn to fix the faucets by, say, maybe tomorrow?”
“The kitchen sink is on the blink again?” Leonard guessed.
“No hot water, that’s all. Mr. Dinger is convinced it’s not serious.”
“Mr. Dinger’s not so serious himself. Last time he fixed everything fine except that the cold water faucet was on the hot line and vice versa.”
“You got used to it, didn’t you? I admit—he’s a lovely man but as a plumber he is not wonderful. Anyway, he’s coming tomorrow to take the place apart—we’ll be in New York at the play. Your mother’s coming over to stay with Suzanne. Actually, he’s crazy about children, he’ll probably reassure her.”
Leonard’s mother, like many people who are not “good” with children, was slightly afraid of them. She preferred those directly related to her, but even they did not crow with glee at her arrival, and in time they grew bored and demanding in her presence, which alarmed her. Without charm or control on her part, there was no telling what they might do.
A play was generally something they went to see because it was in town, like a relative; Rhoda felt the beckon of cultural events as though they were shopping sales. In this case, the theater had mistakenly sent them tickets for a matinee instead of an evening performance, but because The Three Sisters was a play for which Leonard had a particular affection, he had chosen to take the day off from work. Rhoda was just as glad they were going in the day time; Broadway at night, with all its neon signs turned off to honor the dim-out, was not so cheerful, although you weren’t supposed to admit that. Hinda was going with them, as she often did now, in need of escorts like a dowager or a younger sister. Rhoda’s brother Andy had nicknamed her “the caboose,” which tickled Rhoda.
Hinda was waiting for them at the bus stop, sitting on a bench knitting. She wore a blue wool suit with a sprig of fake cherries in the lapel. She had put on weight since Stanley’s departure, but her appearance was hardly altered by it—she had always had a blurred and peachy attractiveness, the relaxed flesh of a pleasant person. “We’ll have to report back to Stanley,” Leonard said as they kissed hello, “that you really are stickin’ to your knittin’, kitten.” Hinda laughed and put her needles and yarn away, modest as though she’d been caught reading a letter.
They were silent through most of the bus ride to the city. Leonard had brought a copy of the play with him so that he could review it before seeing it. He was odd about his books; he wrote his name formally in all of them—Leonard S. Taber—so that even the ones he’d never gotten to read became his in a way that led Rhoda to shun them, approaching them only to dust them once they acquired the gravity of his signature. She read actively herself, always before bed, but as a form of light refreshment, magazines and best-sellers. She could remember as a girl having wept over The Mill on the Floss, but that passion was merely comical to her now.
Hinda had the seat near the window; in profile her face was more imposing than Rhoda tended to think of it, and her unguarded expression was grave and inwardly absorbed. She had been “very good” about Stanley’s being gone, although occasionally she did things Rhoda thought were silly, like sending him locks of the children’s hair or saving menus for him from restaurants she went to. She was immensely fond of her husband, almost doting. He was a good-looking man, a sharp dresser, not too bright, often sour and sarcastic in his opinions, but never unkind to Hinda; his worst fault in marriage was that he spent money too freely.
Hinda never complained about managing without him, but she had fits of indecisiveness. She had taken to visiting Rhoda’s mother (which didn’t surprise Rhoda—Hinda’s own mother was a notably useless person). Rhoda’s mother, who believed any activity was good, had talked Hinda into being a bookkeeper for the temple’s war-bond drive. Outwardly Hinda was still fresh and placid, only in her calm there was something a little dreamy and distracted, where a darkening knowledge had brought her into contact with larger forces, and marked her, even in Rhoda’s eyes, with an altered stature.
Through the bus window, Rhoda looked out at the Jersey flatlands, muddy with melting snow; ahead, the city’s buildings were coming into view from across the river. “Look how clear it is,” Hinda said. “You can see the whole Manhattan skyline.”
“It’s always clearest in the cold,” Rhoda said.
The bus went down into the dark of the tunnel and emerged suddenly into a daylight heady with noise and traffic. They walked east across Forty-second Street. Times Square was clogged with soldiers and sailors, slow-moving groups of boys with nowhere to go. Along the curb, at her own pace, a girl with a long, straining neck walked in the characteristic gait of the cerebral-palsied, one leg scissoring behind her as the other veered with the knee bent to bring her crookedly forward, bent wrists jerking in the air.
“Don’t get lost,” Rhoda said to Hinda. “Stay by us.”
“I forget about the city when I’m not here,” Leonard said. “We should come in more often. Everything is here. Everything. It’s one of the great cities. Chekhov�
��s Moscow must have been like this.”
They had turned onto Forty-fourth Street from Broadway and were out of the congested area now. Near them a very elegant woman in a turban and an ocelot coat with wide sleeves was carrying, of all things, a bag of groceries. Rhoda was amazed that anyone lived around here, especially someone like that. Why live so close to raw, milling crowds when you could afford not to? Leonard could go on about the city’s endless variety, its range of possibilities like a great playground for the enquiring mind. Rhoda liked coming into the city and she considered its proximity one of their advantages, but it did not draw her to it any more than a trip to a planetarium would have made her long to live on Venus.
They were early for the play—Leonard was rigorously prompt—and they sat in the theater, mouthing small talk to each other in respectful whispers as the seats filled with ticket-holders, women mostly, stepping gingerly in their high heels on the carpeted steps. Rhoda turned to say something to Leonard, and she saw he had picked up his book again. “Doesn’t it hurt your eyes to read in this light?”
“Yes,” he said, “it does.”
“So put the book down, it’s rude.” He was about to give her a sharp answer when the theater went dark.
The play began. Three actresses in high-necked dresses were pacing back and forth or reclining in uncomfortable languor on a sofa, complaining of this and that, wistful and helpless. Their listlessness made Rhoda feel out of temper with them. Leonard was laughing—the army doctor had just stood up and declared, “You said just now, baron, that our age will be called great, but people are small all the same. Look how small I am.” Rhoda smiled, won to a certain amusement by Leonard’s enjoyment. But all that sighing: no wonder there had been a revolution in Russia. When one of the sisters asked, “But what are we to do?” Rhoda wanted to say, “Oh, go take a walk around the block.” By the end of the second act, Rhoda knew they were never going to get to Moscow. Leonard said, “You’re right,” and it was odd to her that he found this thought satisfying.
He was awash in a rapturous melancholy, whose form Rhoda could recognize and follow, as one follows a tune—what she could not understand was how it was uplifting. She wanted dimly to partake of it. When the curtain went down, Leonard applauded for a long time; he seemed to want to stay in his seat, to retain the sensation produced in him by the play. Outside the theater, Rhoda said, with a deliberate brashness, “Well, that was a puzzler.” Neither Hinda nor Leonard answered. “It just goes to show you,” Rhoda went on, “what nothing lives they led then. It’s a period piece.”
“Some people still lead nothing lives,” Hinda suggested lightly. She had been crying in the last act and now her face looked peasant-red in the wind. Rhoda didn’t expect any elucidating analysis from Hinda, who was something of a simpleton.
But Leonard was irritated. “A period piece,” he snorted. “Who taught you to spoil a great thing by giving it a name like that?”
“So what did I miss, so what’s the message?” Rhoda said. Did they do anything, the characters, except walk around the stage complaining? Was it so crass of her to shrivel her nose at failure?
Leonard said if she didn’t want to hear about failure, most of world literature was closed to her. “I know,” he said, with an unusual and peevish bluntness, “you’re not that dumb.”
“Excuse me,” she said, but kept quiet after that.
When they returned to the house, the kitchen was a mess of old, encrusted lengths of pipe, Mr. Dinger’s smeared footprints, his toolbox surrounded by its issue of assorted wrenches, and the damp, mineral smell common to cellars. Neither Mr. Dinger nor Suzanne was anywhere in sight. Leonard’s mother, who had been napping on the couch, explained that the plumber had gone to get more parts and had taken Suzanne with him, to give her the treat of riding in the truck. “She likes him,” Mrs. Taber reported. “She was following him around, and he had her handing him his tools and everything. I stayed out of the kitchen most of the time.”
Mr. Dinger arrived shortly after, carrying a cumbrous and undoubtedly very expensive stack of metal pipe; Suzanne was behind him, gripping a small paper bag which—she showed them—contained screws. “She’s a good girl,” Mr. Dinger said. “Very helpful. And she loves trucks. She was pointing them out all along the way on our little ride. But you better be careful what you tell her. She thinks you went to New York to pay your bills.”
“We saw a play,” Leonard said.
“That’s it—play, not pay. I’m a dumbie for not knowing. Right, Suzy?” He winked at the little girl and made a clicking noise out of the side of his mouth.
Suzanne sat on the floor as the plumber crawled under the sink, twisting his body like a mechanic’s under a car. She did not come forth with any bursts of conversation, but watched him with the same quiet absorption she usually showed in her playing. “So what is this great vocabulary you’re keeping tucked under your belt?” Rhoda said, tickling the child under the chin, but Suzanne only wriggled.
That evening Rhoda tried her luck. “No more dish and dat,” she said, as Suzanne tried to grab a piece of cut-up banana from across the table, grunting her pronouns of request. “Say, I want a banana, please.” Suzanne said nothing; she was already eating the banana, and she gazed at her mother with a cross-eyed squint above the soft, smeared mouth.
But later, when Suzanne was dressed for bed and had been kissed by her father and was being led to her crib, she turned—just before being lifted and lowered into that nightly confinement which was no idea of hers—and said, “Wanna drinka wawter.” “Say: please,” Rhoda said. “Peese,” Suzanne said.
“That’s better,” Rhoda said, and brought the little girl her own enameled metal cup filled with water; she wanted to call Leonard to come and hear, but she hesitated to make a fuss—Suzanne had, after all, only done what she was supposed to do.
“That kid could talk all along,” Rhoda told Leonard, who chuckled appreciatively. “It makes me angry. How could she be so young and still keep secrets?”
By the next day Rhoda had tempered her response of mingled resentment and elation—the sting suffered by those who hate surprises and have just been pleasantly surprised—so that the incident was largely comical. She told the story to friends with that style and relish for which she was well known, and with a touch of the aggravated admiration she usually reserved for her husband.
Rhoda now had a “girl” to help her out one day a week—and she liked to repeat Maisie’s proverb, “The Lord gives them to you when you’re young because that’s the only time you can stand them.” By such translations into the jokes of co-workers, Rhoda took Suzanne’s developments; and like a clerk who waits for a promotion, she watched—with a level of interest and an eye out for the future—because they were planning, in a year or two, another one.
4
“EVERYTHING GOES FASTER the second time around,” Rhoda’s mother told her, in the eighth month of her second pregnancy. Still, Rhoda had no reason to expect that birth would take her by surprise; she was caught, as she later said, with her drawers down. Sixteen days before her due date, her water broke while she was trying to make the beds in the morning. It was all much too rapid and savage; she had no time to pack her suitcase for the hospital. Symptoms overtook her defiantly, by force, and she was in heavy labor by the time Leonard had her settled in the back seat of the car.
Once she cried out, “Drive faster,” and she was noticing, like a movie shown at an oddly wrong time, delaying them foolishly, the familiar buildings on Lyons Avenue in Newark, when the head began to emerge. They were just outside the hospital gates when the incredible, bawling cry of an infant made Leonard turn around and gasp, “Oh, my God, it’s over.”
The baby kept yowling, urgent and continual as a burglar alarm. A very young intern came out to the car and cut the cord there where she lay. “Did it all yourself, I see,” he said. “The baby looks fine. It’s a girl.”
Rhoda was beginning to be proud of herself. But when they lift
ed her onto a stretcher, she had the thought that she was being carried from a battlefield, on which, unfairly, she had been taken by ambush.
When she told the story afterwards, Leonard’s helplessness at the time became charming, a measure of his concern, the routinely comic symptom of the nervous father. The baby was named Claire, after Leonard’s mother, who had died from pleurisy the day after V-E Day, in the last month of Rhoda’s pregnancy. The new baby was lighter and quicker than Suzanne had been, as though the rush of her birth was the first warning of a different, more volatile strain of energy. She had none of Suzanne’s self-containment and comfort in amusing herself; she would scream for hours when lowered into her playpen. From the first, she was harder to control—she slid like a bar of soap when Rhoda tried to change and dress her, so that Rhoda’s mother nicknamed her, more or less fondly, vildeh hyeh—wild animal.
Suzanne took the arrival of a sister with alternating disdain and interest. Big for her age at four, she did tend to hug the baby so hard that Claire, at first delighted, would scream and cry until a parent came to pry her from the squeeze, and yet she never shrank from Suzanne’s touch.
This second child was eager to climb into anyone’s lap, pouncing and ready with kisses, like a little dog. She had a shrill, piercing little voice, even before she knew how to form words. Rhoda, who was overwhelmed at how more than doubly burdensome it was having two at home, often shocked herself at her own impatience with both of them. They were too little to be anything but greedy—they would take and take, with no conscience or feeling of debt; it was their nature and she forgave them, but she would have wanted to be more “taken care of” herself. Leonard was too much her peer, and no better at managing than she was. She would have liked to feel bulwarked by his absolute protection; in lieu of this, she liked to watch him with the children.