by Susan Tabin
The River Beneath The River
A Novel of the Awakening Spirit
by
Susan Tabin
Clear View Press
Los Angeles ~ California
The River Beneath The River
www.clearviewpress.com
Copyright © 2011 Clear View Press
All Rights Reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any
form or by any means electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording or otherwise, without
the written permission of the publisher.
Published in the United States by
Clear View Press
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters
and events portrayed in this novel are either
fictitious or are used fictitiously.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Tabin, Susan. The river beneath the river : a novel of the awakening spirit / Susan Tabin. p. cm.
ISBN 0-9743793-5-2 (trade pbk.)
1. Young women--Fiction. 2. Women travelers--Fiction. 3. Brooklyn (New York, N.Y.)--Fiction. 4. Americans--Foreign countries--Fiction. I. Title. PS3620.A25R59 2004
813'.6--dc22 2003028171
Paperback ISBN 0-9743793-5-2
Cover art by Larry Whittaker
In loving memory of Helene, my sister, my forever friend
Acknowledgments
The great blessing in my life has been the people I have had the privilege of knowing. Thank you to my family and friends. I love you all.
I especially want to thank Mark Penzer for being so generous with his time. His guidance in the craft of writing and his brilliant editing have been invaluable to me. I am grateful to Larry Whittaker for creating the splendid work of art that graces the cover. My thanks also go to Laren Bright whose review and excellent suggestions have enhanced this book.
Heartfelt thanks to my brother, Howard Levine, for listening to me read the first manuscript draft over the phone and for his helpful suggestions. Thank you to my niece, Marcia Sarah Bate, for loving the story and for the box of Darjeeling Tea. Thank you to Eileen Brown, Lin Whittaker, Nydia Rey and Sharon Huff for reading the manuscript and for their feedback, but mostly for their love and support.
Along the writing way there were many well wishers. I particularly want to thank my nephew, Chuck Solomon, and my brother-in-law, John Bate, for research assistance, and to Miriam Goldstein, Greg Nesper and Sherry Funt for their enthusiasm and encouragement.
Finally, I am deeply grateful to my beautiful husband, Ron, for his love and patience; to my Light-filled daughter, Mindy for inputting early chapters into the computer and for her insight; to my amazing son, Brett who made it possible for the manuscript to be brought into this published book form, and always to my spiritual teachers for holding the Light.
He said, “Come to the Edge.”
I said. “I can’t. I’m afraid.” He said, “Come to the Edge.”
I said. “I can’t. I’ll fall off.” He said, “Come to the Edge.”
And I came to the Edge.
And he pushed me.
And I flew.
-Guillaume Apollinaire
One
I had made love to my brother. Of course I didn’t know he was my brother at the time, nor did he. How I got there is a story filled with odd twists which in retrospect don’t seem odd at all. What is important about my having made love to my brother is how it unlocked some key for me of understanding that when life presses against me leaving me damaged and gasping for air the measure of my resilience is up to me. It’s my choice. I didn’t spend years in therapy, but I didn’t come to this realization on my own either. An extraordinary being named Ere Zeta who I met in Spain and who even today I cannot swear is real or perhaps even human, helped me to heal myself, to accept the unacceptable, and to see life’s events on a much grander scale. The cosmic force that lured me kicking and screaming to where I am as I tell my story began, at least in this lifetime, when my parents fell in love over a cup of Darjeeling tea. During her pregnancy my mother’s small breasts grew enormous—to a size D. That cinched it, it was preordained that I would have a D name. They called me Darci. I was happy they didn’t call me Darjeeling—still I never felt right about my name or about myself. I just didn’t belong… in my family, in New York. I didn’t fit in.
I didn’t fit in with the other teenage girls and when they snubbed me, I showed them. The hand-me-down skirt with the pictures of the Queen’s coronation, from my cousin May, became a souvenir from my trip to London, where I attended the royal crowning. That’s what I told the unfriendly girls.
It was not until later, when I was able to appreciate how my life’s course was influenced by inexplicable occurrences beyond my understanding, that I really began to know who I was. But as a child, I didn’t feel like I belonged in my own skin. It’s white. I wanted to be with the colored people who hung out on the stoops of the aging buildings along Blake Avenue in Brooklyn, where my parents shopped for food in the din of marketplace bustle, amid mounds of vegetables, fruits, hard-shelled nuts and smelly fish hawked by immigrant pushcart vendors.
My parents weren’t immigrants, they were born in New York—my mother, Sela, who looked a lot like Lucille Ball, in the Bronx and my father, Pini, who looked a little like Desi Arnaz, in Brooklyn. The resemblances ended there. My parent’s life wasn’t even remotely funny. The parental world was narrow though not provincial. They were after all liberal Jews, liberal by the standards of 1951, when they shopped on Blake Avenue and left me in the old dented black sedan to admire the charlotte russes in the window of Sugarman’s Bakery.
One of these I would get if, my mother promised in her soft voice, “You sit and wait like a good girl, Darci.”
A cupcake-size, yellow sponge pastry, in a white scalloped cardboard holder, topped with whipped cream and a maraschino cherry. Oh I wanted it. I also wanted to be with the dark-skinned, strong-bottomed women who were bumping and grinding and thrusting themselves up against the dark-skinned men who bumped and gyrated and thrusted back, whiskey bottles in brown paper bags in hand. The playful talk, the loose lips, loose hips, the colorful cotton clothing and nappy hair were all inviting to me as chunks of rich chocolate.
When one day my parents returned to the car I asked, “What does fuck mean?”
My mother’s long neck turned red and blotchy. My bull-necked, broad shouldered father stiffened like a number 2 pencil. “Darci, you heard that from the schvartzers—don’t say that. It’s a dirty word!”
I didn’t get a charlotte russe that day, and I never forgot my introduction to dirty words. For a long time I was under the spell of the strange word that mortified my parents while the dark-skinned grownups verbally had permission to express their impulses, gratify their appetites and be free as birds. For a long time I secretly wanted to say “fuck me” to a dark-skinned man.
The first time I saw a dark-skinned person I was with my father at the Scranton train station. Black as coal. I couldn’t take my eyes off him; I didn’t want to take my eyes off him. He was the most compelling looking man I’d ever seen. Decades before the “Black is Beautiful” slogan was born, the black train station porter was utterly beautiful to this five-year-old beholder. I was fascinated by the way the man looked, his color, his flat nose, his friendliness when he knelt down to my size and called me “chile,” as in, “Here’s a piece of candy for you, sweet chile.” Everything about the irresistible man seemed vaguely familiar. A sense of recognition was stirring in me, like the primal music of a seashell held close to my ear, coaxing me to recall.
> Four years later, at nine, having moved from the honeysuckle scented foothills of northeast Pennsylvania back to Brooklyn, the colored folks on the red paint-peeled stoop in the sticky heat of a New York summer seemed all the more familiar. The stirring in me was the beginning of a longing to know my own heart and the hearts of others.
~
T John was a cocoa-skinned Negro boy in my third grade class. We were friends. Like a hummingbird’s tongue stretched forth to sweet nectar I was drawn to him immediately.
“Rudolph the red nose reindeer—no one has a red nose,” T John said, heaving his skinny body into a swell of laughter.
“Why not, T John? You have a brown nose.”
T John buried his head in his hands, hiding his face.
“I’m sorry,” I said to T John, but there was no taking back the words. Like birds flown the coop, they were out. “I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings, T John. I like your color.”
“I hate it; the kids say I have doody on me,” he said in a muffled whimper as he sat down at his wooden lift-top desk and continued to cover his brown face.
“Darci, I won’t be home this afternoon. I have a doctor appointment. Go to Grandma and Papa’s after school,” my mother had instructed in the morning while she soothingly brushed the sleep out of my dark brown hair and tamed my hair in a ponytail. Her knobby arthritic fingers wrapped around the flat handle of the brush didn’t fit with the rest of her body. She was pretty, my mother, with her long swan-neck, high apple-cheeks, and strawberry blond hair.
When the final bell rang, I told T John, “I’m not goin’ home today. I’m goin’ to Milford Street; it’s on the way. I can walk with you.”
T John looked down at his mirror-polished shoes, shifted from side to side, shrugged one bony shoulder into a “whatever,” and we walked together. T John was tired of being teased about his color. He refused to fully accept my apology and by the end of the school year our wilted friendship had shriveled and liquefied like a virused caterpillar. A parting took place between us, a tugging emotion I would experience again.
People would come in and out of my life in an unpredictable, unsteady procession. For one reason or another, obvious or unrevealed, some left while others were taken from me. And some friendships chilled while others ended—sometimes abruptly, sometimes slowly, and sometimes, like the imperceptible receding of a glacier, so subtle, that it was only in looking back I realized a relationship had simply faded away.
Two
Riva and Harry Beriman lived on a slow Brooklyn block crowded with old maple trees and small wood houses. Grandma Riva said the houses were older than the moon. “But,” she always quickly added with affection, “Milford’s a plum, like a small-town street.” I love the way her skin smelled of lavender, and how her little front yard garden was filled with snowball flowers, pink and bluish. Grandma always said, “This garden is impossible, small as a thimble. One of these days the hydrangeas are gonna strangle the lions.”
The lions stood like concrete sentries on each side of the three steps to the red frame house. One lion was missing its front paw and the other one, a nose.
“Come sit down, have a glass of milk, Darcilah,” Grandma said on a day I recall vividly.
I passed bunches of shiny green, spindly mother-in-law’s tongue plants in tall, chipped brown clay urns, and sank into the cushions of a wicker armchair. I could hardly see the yellow and red tulips on the cushions anymore. The stucco walls of the house were the color of the mustard we spread on Hebrew National hot dogs, but the walls were all faded too.
Squinting against the light coming through the bay window, as if she could read my thoughts, Grandma said, “It’s a sun porch and the windows should be uncurtained—and that’s that.”
I finished the cold milk, put my glass down on a low square wicker table with chubby feet and asked, “Grandma, can I play in the cellar?”
“Yes, but be careful on the steps, Darcilah, and stay away from the dresser with Papa’s tools.”
I held onto the banister and descended the steep creaky stairs. I heard my grandfather, Papa Harry, humming America The Beautiful. He put the wood saw down when he saw me and I jumped into his arms. Papa was gray like a cloudy day, and tall and thin with graying hair under a black skull cap that looked like a beanie. His chin was studded with prickly whiskers. Papa was completely different in stature from Grandma who was much shorter, darker and a little bowlegged, with a great soft bosom, round as the whole world. Papa’s nose was long, narrow and straight. His neck curved like a Christmas candy cane and every day he walked in a bent over shuffle to the orthodox temple on Atkins Avenue. Sometimes I went with him, but I didn’t like having to stay separate from him there. Women and even girls sat up in the balcony away from the praying, swaying men on the main floor.
For me, Papa’s basement was the real holy place where I could watch him hammer and saw and make wine by crushing the fat grapes that grew on vines beside the house. The walls in the basement were lined with shelves and the shelves were lined with round Quaker Oatmeal containers filled with nails, screws, nuts and bolts—all kinds of building stuff. Papa’s basement looked like an assembly of Quaker men, shoulder to shoulder in their black coats and Quaker hats.
Papa opened the hatch door leading to the ground above. Crisp air and late afternoon light flood in filled with sawdust particles that Grandma Riva says whirl like God-intoxicated Dervishes. The light is funneled in the direction of an old maple dresser. The mysterious dresser that Grandma constantly commands me not to open. I had thought about snooping and I had approached the forbidden bureau once asking if I could look through the drawers, but Grandma had gotten so upset that I never mentioned it again. Besides, I knew it was always kept locked. As I give it my usual glance I notice something different. One of the drawers is not closed all the way. Almost. But not quite. Today like a compass needle pointing north I’m propelled toward it. I’m not sure why or what I’m looking for, but I’m on a mission as I tug at the left side middle drawer, so stuck it seems to be holding its breath, determined not to be opened. I manage to lure it partially out. Reaching inside I rummage through the drawer, feeling some papers and pulling them forward, when Papa calls.
“Darci, shayne maideleh,” beautiful girl in Yiddish. It didn’t matter that Papa spoke Yiddish and Russian and not a word of English. He talked to me with his watery blue eyes, his faint smile and I knew that he loved me.
Like a wooden bird springing out of a cuckoo clock announcing the hour, I sprang out all wide-eyed in front of Papa to let him know that I was okay and to keep him from checking on me, and I immediately returned to the papers. In my small dusty hands I held a photograph and a marriage license. The photo was of my father with a young braided-haired woman who was not my mother and a little boy standing between them. My father was handsome, younger and thinner, the woman was unfamiliar, and the brown-haired boy in the striped polo shirt was just a toddler. The marriage certificate read Pinchas Theodore Beriman and Mary Alice O’Malley. I stared at the photo, then at the license, back to the photo and again to the license. “What is this? This can’t be,” I thought aloud. But I also understood, making note of the June 5, 1936 date on the marriage certificate, that whatever this was it took place before Pini, Sela and Darci Beriman. This was Pini, Mary Alice and another Beriman child. Where was this child I wondered and my curiosity frightened me. For all I knew he could be as far away as Neptune or Pluto. Or maybe my father had swallowed him like the Roman god Saturn who had swallowed five of his children because an oracle said that one of his children would overthrow him.
How could my family not tell me this? They conveniently edited the book of life and acted as if all this didn’t exist. I was shaken to the marrow of my being. I felt weak as if I were made of clay and might crumble. My hands were trembling. I closed my eyelids, sniffed a deep nervous breath and whispered, “Darci Beriman, Y–G–T–T. . . You’ll–Get–Through–This.”
I felt like a spy as I shoved
the marriage license and the ragged edged photograph in as far as I could and pushed the warped drawer back into its dark resting-place. I didn’t want to upset my parents so I kept the discovery, like a mouth with a canker sore, to myself. Years later I would rue the day I kept this discovery from my parents. But how could I have known that my father’s secret would become my shame.
Three
“Why won’t your mother let us live upstairs now that the renters are out?” my mother pleaded again.
Annoyed, my father raised his baritone voice, “Look, for the goddamn hundredth time, Sela, can’t you understand, she doesn’t want us to move in, she wants the full rent.”
With her knobby knuckled fingers clenched in fistfuls of anger, my mother demanded, “We need more room, Pini, even if we don’t have the money.” Her long neck began to turn blotchy and her pretty face flushed almost to the color of her chin length, wavy strawberry blond hair. She blurted out, “I hate her.”
My father screamed louder, “Don’t talk about my mother, you idiot.”
My mother cried, “You black dog bimbo.”
I cringed, holding my hands over my ears and hurried outside.
Whenever my parents argued over money or our cramped quarters, twisting my world into a spastic kaleidoscope of emotions, I fled the apartment for the streets, developing an independence of coming and going that belied my years.
In the Kasbah-like alleyways between the low-rise tenement buildings on our block, under lines of drying laundry, I played punchball, stickball, cowboys and Indians with neighborhood kids. I can almost taste the explosive cracking, the sulfurous scorch of the red cap rolls that we banged away at in our cap guns. And across the alley under a sycamore tree, its leaves flat as my chest, its white bark an immigration history carved with Italian, Irish and Jewish names, we took turns throwing pocketknives into the ground, drawing lines in the dirt and claiming miniscule slices of territory as our own in a game called “War.”