by Evergreen
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"But you see," Joseph said desperately, "you see, I already have a girl. So I'm really not interested at all, thanks just the same."
Reb Jeselson turned reproachfully to Joseph's mother. "You didn't tell me! And I went to all this trouble!"
"I didn't know!" she cried. "Joseph, you didn't tell me. Why didn't you tell me?"
"I didn't know until just now myself," he said.
They both stared at him as though he had gone crazy, as though he were an idiot or a fool.
Anna. Anna, white-and-pink. A flower on a tall stem in a garden. He had never seen a real garden, yet in some way he knew what it would be like. Fragrant and cool and moist. He hadn't thought he was ready to be married yet; actually he had planned to wait until he was older, thirty perhaps, and well on his way before he encumbered himself. But now it seemed that he was ready, after all. Almost from the first time he had seen her sitting on the steps, reading some learned book in English, and she not a year off the boat!
Her voice, her little feet in kid boots, her sweet-smelling hair, her pretty laugh. The funny, serious way she talked about things. A girl from a village in Poland, and she knew about painters in Paris and writers in England and musicians in Germany! How did she keep it all in that proud, bright head! Oh, Pa would have been pleased with her! He smiled. Pa wouldn't have had the faintest idea what she was talking about, he would have known less than I, and that's little enough. But he would have known quality when he saw it.
Again she stirred in the bed beside him and murmured something in her sleep. He wondered what she might be dreaming, and hoped it was no pain or sorrow. He knew so little about her. Lying there in the dark, he thought how separate they were after all: is it always so? Oh, surely not! Surely if she needed him as he did her they would come together. ... He knew that her need, her love, were not like his. But they had been married so short a time, only a few months. He could be patient. They would have a child and that itself would draw them nearer. Yes, they would have a child: perhaps one was already on the way? In the powerful surge and release when they came together surely there was the creation of a
child? Such feelings must result in something; wasn't that what life was all about?
His body began to grow light under the covers. His mind began to blur. He thought: now, now I'm falling asleep. Keen thought lost its edge; his mind began to float in a lustrous mist, a wash of shifting shapes and color, red ovoids, lavender spirals, columns of cream and silver rising like smoke. Then a curtain fell, dark foliage of dreams, and through the dusky green a spray of gilded dots, confetti dots. No, coins they were, golden coins, and when he reached out his hand they fell through his fingers and into his palm: not hard, not metal at all, but soft like rain, a soft, protecting rain to wash over Anna and his mother and his father. No, no, he thought, it is too late for my father and soon will be too late for my mother. But for Anna, over Anna, the warm and lovely golden rain must fall.
By midnight he was asleep.
10
They stood modestly back to back in the women's bathhouse until their bathing suits were on, black taffeta skirts, black stockings, slippers and straw bonnet tied under the chin so the breeze couldn't blow it away. Anna had never worn a bathing suit before; her legs, except for the stockings, were uncovered to the knees and she felt ashamed to go out in public like that. But she would not have admitted it to Ruth, who had been often at the beach and was very sure of herself.
"See, I told you the suit would look fine!" Ruth said. "You don't show at all, and the baby due so soon! As for me, I always look like an elephant when I'm expecting. Come, we'll find a good spot before the crowds arrive, that's the best thing about getting here early," she went on, as they lifted their feet through the heavy sand.
Solly and Joseph had already spread the blankets. Harry and Irving, big boys of nine and ten, knobby like their father in maroon striped suits, were already in the water. The little girls had shovels and pails.
"Ah, there you are!" Joseph cried. His expression, that no one else would have noticed, told Anna that she looked very fine. In these few months they had already got a kind of secret "married" language; she had thought it would take longer for a man and woman to do that.
"Now I can really see the ocean!" she said. "It was different when we crossed over, so dark and angry, it seemed."
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Here the sea was mild and lovely, the surf breaking in rows of ruffled white and sighing softly out again.
"We'll be going in for a while," Solly announced.
"Let me go too!" Anna cried.
Joseph frowned. "No, no. God forbid that you should fall! Next year I'll bring you, I promise I will."
The blankets had been spread next to a breakwater. Ruth propped herself against a rock and put the lunch basket in its shade. "Wait till you see the fireworks tonight. It's a pity there aren't more holidays! Decoration Day we come but it's usually too cold to go in the water then. Look at those boys of mine, look at them splashing! They'll get water in their ears! Maybe I'll just duck in, too, for a minute."
Anna lay back. The baby moved in her, thumping weakly against her spread palms. Her body was languid from its warm burden and the warm sun. What would he be like, this child? She was so impatient to see his face. What would he be like? Would he live with them happily, would he love them? Sometimes, no matter what you did for them, children did not love their parents. Would he be like anyone they had known, or perhaps like someone long dead whose name they had never even heard?
Oh, but this was a wanted baby, as much by the father as the mother! Joseph took such pride in her swelling body, the skin stretched tightly, blue-white as milk. He worried and fretted. "You don't have to be cleaning and cooking all day. A couple of eggs for supper will be enough for me. You don't get enough rest, you're always running and doing something." Then, a moment later, he would admonish, "Be sure to get out and take a long walk tomorrow, it's very important to have exercise. That way you'll have an easier time, Dr. Arndt says." She had been astonished. "You spoke to the doctor?" "Well, I wanted to hear for myself that you were all right, so I stopped in."
Yes, Joseph would always take care of things. She thought of him as a builder and planner, moderate and careful; he had come to their marriage with confidence; he would build it carefully, stone on stone, to rise and last. In him there was no betrayal. He meant what he said and he said what he meant. In him there was only trust. Lying beside him at night, she felt his sturdiness, the safety of sleeping there, the tenderness.
And tenderness was all she wanted. The other, the force that drove him as though he would plunge in and become part of her,
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she did not need. She knew that he was feeling something very powerful, but she felt nothing of it herself. It was only the loving warmth that mattered. She supposed, anyway, that women never really liked anything more than that; the rest was only to satisfy a husband and to have children. Not, of course, that she had ever discussed the subject with anyone. Perhaps, if she had had a sister? But then the sister wouldn't have known ahy more about it than she did.
Once, when she had been stitching trousers at Ruth's, Anna had overheard two of the women whispering something about being so tired at night, and how no matter how hard they worked men were never too tired. Still, it was good to know that your husband wanted you. The things he whispered at night—it was embarrassing to remember them. But men were made that way, so it must be a good thing, it must be right.
"You look like your mother, Anna," Ruth said. Anna opened her eyes. Ruth was standing over her, drying herself with a towel.
"Do I?"
"I never saw her very often, but certain things about her come to my mind. She was different from other people."
"How different?"
"She didn't talk about the things women in the villages talked about. I always thought she ought to have lived in Warsaw or maybe Vilna, where the schools are. She would have fitted there. Althou
gh she never complained, not that I remember, anyway."
"You don't remember anything more?"
"No, I was only a child myself, after all, when I left home."
And I remember standing in the windy burial ground thinking that I must try to hold on to their faces and voices before they should slip away. And now they have really slipped away. And there isn't a human being on this side of the ocean who knows anything about my life up to four years ago. It is a severance, the major part of my life cut off, except in the privacy of my own mind.
"It's too bad when a family is split like that. You've no one close here for your children to know, except for Joseph's mother, of course."
"She's sixty-four," Anna said.
"Is she? I would have thought even more, she seems so old," Ruth remarked.
"She's had a hard life. We wanted to bring her today, she's
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never been at the beach. In all these years, imagine! But she wouldn't come."
"What will you do when she gets too old or sick to keep the store?" Ruth was curious. "Do you suppose Joseph will want her to live with you?"
"I don't know. We've never talked about it," Anna said, suddenly troubled. That gloomy, sour-smelling old woman in the house! Then came a wave of shame and pity. Poor thing, poor thing! To be old in another woman's house, a strange young woman who didn't want you!
"If that ever happens and Joseph wants her, why, we'll have to do it, that's all," she said quietly.
"You're a kind girl, Anna. I'm glad for both your sakes that I sent Joseph down to talk to you that day."
"I've never thanked you," Anna said, with embarrassment.
"Pshaw! I wasn't looking for thanks! But he thanked me, he was quite mad about you from the very first time. He thought you didn't like him, that's why he was afraid for so long to talk about marriage. You know," she explained, "he thought you were in love with somebody else, but I told him you weren't. If it had been anyone but Joseph I would have let him go on thinking so, because generally it's a good idea to keep men guessing. But Joseph is different, he's so—" Ruth sought the word—"honest. Yes, that's it, he's so honest."
"That's true," Anna said. "He is." And she sat quite still while Ruth talked on, only half hearing, feeling, in the pouring sunshine, how good it was to be like this. Down at the water's edge Joseph was throwing a ball to the boys. He looked like a boy himself, fast and happy. She could hear his voice ring. She hadn't known he knew how to play. This was the way a man ought to be, the way he ought to live. Perhaps this was what God intended for man when He put him on the earth, to be free, to run in the bright air with all the other living things.
But no, how was that possible? Who was to pay for it? Always it came back to that. This outing today, the carfare, the food, they had to be paid for. "In the sweat of thy brow shalt thou earn thy bread," Joseph always said. He liked to quote from the Bible. It seemed that he could find an explanation for everything in the Bible.
After a while the men came back and sat down. "Feeling all right, Anna?" Joseph asked.
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"Just wonderful!"
"Tell me if you get tired."
"Tired! I'm tired doing nothing!" She took her crocheting, a long rectangle of white lace, out of her basket.
"Solly, look!" Ruth cried. "It's gorgeous! What are you making?"
Anna felt suddenly shy. "A cover for the baby carriage. It will go over a sateen lining, pink or blue, as soon as we know."
Ruth shook her head admiringly. "You know how to do things, Anna! You're so clever, between baking and handwork—"
"Tell her," Joseph interrupted, "about the carriage," and went on to tell about it himself. "We bought it last week on Broadway. White wicker, with a top that rolls back for sun or shade, whichever you want."
"Oh," Ruth said, "the first baby is wonderful. You've plenty of time for it—Vera and June, stop throwing sand at Cecile! You ought to be ashamed of yourselves!"
"Bet you don't know what sand is," Harry said importantly.
"Sand? Why, it's what's on the beach," his mother answered.
"Hah! It's rocks, ground fine, after millions and millions of years. I knew you didn't know!"
Anna picked up a handful. The fine, dry stuff poured between her fingers, sharp, twinkling particles on her skin. Yes, it was like pieces of rock, the shining splinters in rock.
"So, you are getting an education from my son," Solly observed, and in a lower voice confided to Anna and Joseph, "They tell me he's number one in his class. He wants to know everything and he never forgets. You tell him something once, he never forgets," he repeated with pride. Then, falling sober and silent, "I wish I could get ahead! I mean really get enough together so I could start a little business of my own." He swung around, addressing Joseph alone. "Some people do it, I don't know how. My boss started the way I am, but I never seem to get ahead."
"Five children," Joseph said gently. "That takes some doing."
"Yes, yes, God bless them, it does. And I want to do so much for them all!" And he sat a moment, looking out to sea, as though an answer were waiting for him there. Then he jumped up.
"This air gives you an appetite! How about feeding the hungry army, Ruth?"
"Wait, wait, I'm coming!" Ruth admonished, unwrapping the paper bags, and delving in the basket, withdrew one after the other
a corned beef, a salami, pickles, sour tomatoes, coleslaw, hard-boiled eggs and two long loaves of dark bread.
"And watermelon for dessert," she finished. "Leave that in the shade till we're ready for it."
"Cookies," Anna said, producing a neat box tied with ribbon. "I baked yesterday, two kinds."
"And an orange for each of you children," Ruth added. "Here, boys, don't grab. Vera, keep your feet off the blanket, you'll get sand in the food."
Joseph always said Ruth talked too much, Anna remembered with amusement.
"Here, Solly, don't eat so fast! That husband of mine, he'll choke himself someday, God forbid, and the boys are the same. Now Cecile, on the other hand, I have to open her mouth and stick the food in, a bird eats more! Joseph, help yourself, there's plenty. And make your wife eat, she shouldn't forget she's eating for two!"
Anna met Joseph's eyes and suppressed a smile. Again, their private language: "Don't get me wrong, I like Ruth, she's the salt of the earth. But if I had to live with her, I'd go crazy. Her tongue never stops: gabble, gabble, gabble."
Solly rubbed his stomach. "A real feast," he sighed, and remembering his duties as a host, "You're enjoying yourself, Anna?"
"Oh, I am, I am! Think, here we are on the very edge of the continent! If you looked straight ahead across the ocean, all those thousands of miles, you'd see—"
"Poland," Ruth interjected. "And I'd just as soon not see Poland again, if you don't mind."
"Not Poland," Anna corrected. "Portugal. And behind it Spain. I'd like to go there someday. Miss Thorne was in Spain, her father was a United States consul there. She says it's beautiful."
"Not me! I never want to see any part of Europe again." Solly shook his head. "Especially now, with the way things are. They look very bad if you ask me."
"What do you mean?" Joseph asked.
"There'll be war," Solly answered seriously.
"You always think the worst!" Ruth cried. "Why do you have to say such things?"
"Because it's true. As soon as I read last week that a Serb had shot the Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo, I said, 'There'll be war, you mark my words.'"
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"Who was he, this archduke?" Anna asked.
"The Austrian archduke, heir to the throne. So that means Austria will declare war on Serbia, and then Russia will come in with Serbia. Germany will have to help Austria; France will come in with Russia. And there you have it."
Joseph took another slice of watermelon. "Well," he said practically, "all that's across the ocean. It won't bother us here."
Anna sat with her head down, fear running
through her like water.
And Ruth said with sudden insight, "Anna is thinking of her brothers. They'd have to fight for Austria."
"What's the point of this gloomy talk of things we don't even know about?" Joseph demanded. "Nobody can tell what's going to happen. I'll wager it will all blow over, anyway. Nobodyi wants war, and here we are spoiling a beautiful day with worry over something that will probably never happen."
"You're right," Solly apologized. "You're absolutely right, Joseph. Who wants to waste a day like this? Let's go back for a swim."
The sun was low and red in the west. "That means it'll be a hot day tomorrow," Joseph predicted, coming toward the women.
"The days I can stand but it's the nights that are awful," Solly said. "Sleeping on the fire escapes, it's torture."