It was strange, finding herself in a clean little motel room, this box on the sand, with a man she barely knew, who now slept deeply.
She stared at Sasha from the bathroom doorway: his arm hung off the bed, knuckles grazing the carpet, his palm loosely open, as if entreating her to come back. His face was turned away from the morning sun splintering through the blinds, and she tracked the slant of his cheekbones, the tendons in his neck, his body barely containing all the life running through it.
Last night, when he had delved into her, she felt tightly warm and dark with bursts of jagged light, that dislodged each piece of her, as though the carefully placed glass squares in a mosaic were coming undone: her marriage to Max, the war, fleeing France and losing Lucie, her stilted existence in Los Angeles, and the heavy history of before: leaving Russia on the eve of the revolution, the china-blue walls of her childhood bedroom, Agnes’s hands caressing her into sleep, the same hands that had held and comforted Lucie.
* * *
• • •
The sheets were twisted at the foot of the bed. She studied the scene, perplexed by how easily she had gone with Sasha in his convertible, speeding down the highway, and then she had suggested they spend the night together, taken aback and intrigued by her own boldness.
She smiled faintly, remembering the English term for it: a one-night stand.
Sighing, Vera lit a cigarette and leaned into the door frame. She wondered when Sasha would wake up and realize the error in assuming she was the type of woman who took pleasure easily and lightly, unburdened and spilling over with desire, as she had seemed last night. It almost caused her to laugh, struck by this sardonic illusion, as if the farce of herself was finally coming to light.
What a mess, she thought, inhaling deeply. I’m going mad, just as Max said I would.
She watched Sasha sleep, unable to ignore the pulse between her legs, as if he were still inside her, his fingers tracing the curve of her ribs, his stubble against the side of her neck, which she touched now, her skin slightly razed and red.
She thought to yesterday, blue-black hair falling in his eyes, his jaw tensing when he saw her at Villa Aurora, as if he’d always been waiting for her. With his Russian name, there was something sweet and familiar about him, and the hum of energy between them contained a lilting melody that maybe only she heard. When he sped down the highway, he glanced over at her, and with his hand resting on her thigh, his bemused smile suggested that he could easily take her away from all this.
She looked at herself in the cloudy mirror of the armoire, shrugging off the towel, letting it fall to the carpet. She noted her smooth stomach and upright frame, her wavy hair skimming her bony shoulders. It had been a long time since she’d looked at herself like this. She touched her abdomen, her hips, the swell of her thighs, and, for an instant, she returned to a younger self, before she was a mother, before they fled Europe, before grief had made her invisible.
Chapter 2
SASHA
October 1940, New Rochelle, New York
Sasha sat in the back seat of Dubrow’s Cadillac, fidgeting with his cuff links, his jacket too tight in the shoulders, and stared out at the manicured lawns and white mansions on the way to the Hampshire Country Club. He felt out of place in this sedate affluence, with its circular driveways and spiral-shaped topiaries. The suit didn’t fit right, having gone unworn for over a year. In California, no one wore suits. But he was home for the High Holidays, which dictated dark suits and ties, and that you sit in shul for hours on end while intermittently a congregant blew the shofar, the whole room quaking with centuries of expectation for that long, sob-like blast.
During the ride up to New Rochelle from the Lower East Side, he thought about how different “home” was, since his mother, Leah, had moved into Dubrow’s New Rochelle house five years ago, after they got married. But Sasha was still a kid from Rivington Street: broken storefront windows and toy guns, games of cops and robbers under the shadowy arcade of the rumbling El, and pushcarts rattling down the uneven streets selling everything from dead chickens with the feathers still on to plump watermelons in the summer, Mr. Ferrucci bellowing out, “Red like fire, sweet like sugar.”
* * *
• • •
Leah and Dubrow now rated the merit of the shofar blower, joking that because Schiller’s teenage son had performed the task, the sound was a weak imitation of the blast meant to rouse the dead and rejoice in the new year. Sasha half listened to their griping, in a mixture of English and Yiddish, while trying to hear the radio on low, reporting that Vichy France had enforced new legislation in regard to its Jewish population. Leah and Dubrow brushed the news aside, casually, as if swatting a pesky fly, but this was more or less their general attitude, as if the trouble in Europe didn’t apply to them, believing America was exempt, an unquestionably safe haven, whereas Sasha wasn’t so sure.
Leah turned around in her seat, her dark eyes flashing with mischief. “What did you think, bubbala?”
“Schiller did all right.” Sasha tried to smile, seeing how much she loved that he was home, even for a few days. She was forever betrayed that he’d moved away, and forever hoping he’d move back. The High Holidays, the “Days of Awe,” as they were called, perennially filled his mother with heaviness and light, with sweetness and angst, her gaze retreating inward to a distant place when she recited the evening kiddush before dinner. He always wondered why this time of year affected her so much, guessing that she remembered the Jewish holidays in the shtetl attracting violence, pogroms, though here in America they were safe. Sasha used to remind her of this when he was young, when they lived in the tenement apartment, just the two of them. And yet, when leaves began falling and the light turned golden, her emotions heightened, her eyes glistening with the past.
Waiting for him to say more about the Schiller boy, about the service, about the new rabbi, too young in her opinion, so that they could return to their joking and gossip, to the way it used to be, she added, “Are you sure you can’t stay until Yom Kippur? It would be so nice if—”
“Ma,” he began, but then she interrupted, “Fine,” and turned away from him, refocusing on the road.
When Rosh Hashanah ended in a few days, he would return to Los Angeles, where he’d been working as a screenwriter for the last two years, writing one-offs for the studios. And Leah knew, as much as she didn’t want to, that she couldn’t keep him here. Ever since he was young, she’d called him a dreamer, a luftmensch, head in the clouds, uninterested in life’s practicalities. That’s how she saw his choice to live in California, where he knew no one, had no one, when in New York, she used to say, opportunity presented itself like a rich salty oyster. She thought he was crazy not to take advantage, when for most of Sasha’s childhood, they had been so disadvantaged. Things had changed after Leah met Dubrow. Dubrow owned a string of cafeterias, and with no children of his own, he’d groomed Sasha for the business, starting him out as a busboy at fifteen, and then a waiter, and finally a manager of the Lower East Side location under Leah’s watchful, hopeful eye.
But Sasha couldn’t force himself into wanting that life. He’d grown up on the streets, intrigued by the heated arguments unfolding on every corner, the women yelling from one window to another over laundry lines crisscrossing alleys and tiny gardens, betrayals and sacrifices pulsating behind every door, while lovers, leaning against a chain-link fence on the schoolyard’s edge, made promises they couldn’t keep. On their rooftop, he and his friends kept pigeons, giving them names and distinct personalities, with innate desires and dislikes, much like the people they knew.
The neighborhood was rich with gossip, but poor in every other respect, and his mother taught him to love the stories that circulated from tenement to tenement like wildfire. Together they found a special joy in reporting that Mrs. Markowitz had left her nice husband for a Polish painter, a lout who drank, or that Tedora Binaggi, who lived upsta
irs, had lost her parents at the age of three on the voyage over to America from Italy. She had waited at Ellis Island with a white placard hanging from her neck, until a nice Italian woman took her hand, and whispered, “Vieni con noi.”
These stories, they grew inside him, gaining momentum and energy, as though he carried blueprints of great cities in his mind, urging him to construct plots with gut-wrenching twists, characters with secrets, hidden pasts, and unexpected futures, awaiting them all. It wasn’t really a choice, to write, as he was propelled by the unconscious need to rescue the truth from vagueness and omission, from the distortion of memory, from the desire to alter the story so that it reflected better upon the storyteller. And maybe this urge to know more, to understand what had really happened, grew out of the silence that blanketed his own past, with its many gaps.
Sasha was born a year into the Great War, in a shtetl twenty kilometers from Riga, and his earliest memories were blurry, as everyone’s were, but more so given the unsteady times: all the men left to fight, and then other men arrived, German soldiers. The war bled into the revolution, the czar’s White Army against the Reds. Certain images persisted: his mother stoking blue embers in the fireplace, willing the smoldering sparks to warm them, dipping small pieces of bread in salt; a forest full of pine trees; the sound of a bullhorn roaring from the town square, barking orders he couldn’t understand, Germanic, harsh, unbending. The fear in his mother’s eyes when they ventured outside, her hand clenching his. A fear that persisted long after the war because, he later realized, she was husbandless, with a little boy to fend for, which left her subject to hostility and judgment, but only later did he guess the full extent of it.
* * *
• • •
During the worst of their arguments, Leah often said that if he didn’t like the cafeteria business, then he should at least consider college, where he could learn a respectable profession like law or medicine, and Dubrow would pay for it. But again, living under someone else’s thumb, no matter how generous and gentle that thumb might be, Sasha couldn’t do it. So he started thinking about how he could make a living from telling stories, and got a job writing copy at the New York Daily Mirror his last year of high school, and then, because he wrote fast, he became a crime reporter at seventeen. He smoked cigars to look older, and what began as an affectation grew into a natural part of his personality. Soon, he started handing out cigars to cops for leads, which worked better than passing out sticks of chewing gum. Most nights, he came home late, or not until breakfast, and after a shower and a peck on his mother’s cheek, he dashed off to high school, barely waiting for the bell to ring, when he could return to his disorderly office desk, a few steps from the men’s room, waiting for a hot tip that would launch him back onto the streets.
Leah shook her head, muttering that he was a “vulture for bad news,” chasing leads of bank robberies, tenement fires, murderesses, gambling rings, and “leapers,” as they called those who threatened suicide from the rooftops of skyscrapers as Sasha and the other reporters barked out questions from below. With crime scenes and the city morgue his regular haunts, he knew this work disappointed his mother, despite his increasingly numerous bylines, to the point where she stopped reading his articles; they were too disturbing, too bloody, too human. But when he went out on assignments, adrenaline coursed through his veins. He often arrived at the scene before the police, prowling for anything incongruous, pressing down harder on a detail that didn’t quite fit, something closer to the truth but not close enough, and often then, the truth came tumbling out.
He did this for five years, juggling crime reporting and managing Dubrow’s to keep his mother happy, and he felt as wet and malleable as concrete when it’s first laid, unmarred by footsteps, pleased by the thought that he could easily shift paths.
* * *
• • •
Just after his twenty-third birthday, his mother set him up with Margaret Altman, of the Altman department stores. “She’s home for summer break from Vassar,” his mother explained, adding proudly that Margaret studied anthropology and music. Sasha took her to a dance at the Hampshire Country Club, where many matches of the Westchester Jewish elite were made, her chaperone watching from the corner. “My aunt,” Margaret said with a touch of embarrassment. Generous diamonds twinkled in her ears, a corsage of baby white roses gracing her delicate wrist. She asked, trying to make small talk, if he enjoyed the cafeteria business, quickly adding when she saw his confusion, “I mean, aren’t you taking over Dubrow’s . . . eventually?”
Eventually.
The word hung in the air, accumulating weight, his chest constricting with the notion that the concrete was beginning to set, hardening under his wingtips, even within the time it took for the song to end, the band playing “April in Paris.” The longer he stayed here, dancing with Margaret, the sooner the grand vista of his future would narrow down to a fine point, with little chance for something else, something more.
Shortly after this, a query on gold-embossed letterhead showed up from an executive at Warner Bros., offering Sasha five hundred dollars to write a script based on the Waldorf Astoria double-suicide case. The week prior, Sasha had written an article about these newlyweds who had supposedly taken their own lives, found naked in the bathtub with a bullet shot through the man’s head, but the woman, save for light bruising around her neck, was left untouched. Convinced the fancy letter was a prank, cooked up by one of his fellow reporters, Sasha telephoned the studio in Los Angeles and asked to speak to the man from Warner’s.
“Is this real?” Sasha asked, the phone receiver balanced between his neck and hiked-up shoulder as he buttoned up the white pressed shirt he had to wear for his shift at the cafeteria, along with the silly black bow tie.
The man explained that they thought the case would make a good picture, and when Sasha retorted that he knew everything they did, it was right there in print, the man said, slightly exasperated, that because of legal constraints, they couldn’t just pluck the story from the pages of the Mirror.
“So, how’s this gonna make a good picture, with the case still unsolved?”
“You don’t get it.” The man sighed. “This is the movies. Make up the ending.”
“Just make it up?” Sasha repeated, feeling slightly dumb as the words tumbled from his mouth. At the same time, he wasn’t sure if he could just make things up for a living . . . it had been hammered into him to hunt down the truth, untangle fact from fiction, not create more fiction.
Even though Sasha turned down the offer, the seed had been planted. As he greeted customers and handed out menus, he imagined his stories illuminated on the wide screen, viewed by thousands in the anonymous dark. As a kid in the summer, he and his friends would watch three shows a week, stealing into air-conditioned theaters, sinking into plush velour seats, the cowboys swaggering and towering before them, guns drawn, jaws clenched. He never thought he could actually make movies like those, until this seductive fantasy began to throb through him while he loitered around the cold morgue in the early dawn, waiting for a scoop, his clothes stinking of formaldehyde. Images of the stories he’d reported demanded more life: A matronly ambulance attendant tagging a corpse with such gentleness and care, as though bidding goodbye to her own son, or a young woman’s body found in the middle of Park Avenue, her alligator purse flung a few feet away, after she had jumped from a moving car. A police chief smiling down at a pair of newborn kittens he cupped in his palms, having just rescued them from a dumpster when searching for the murder weapon. He started jotting down these observations in a notebook, and soon, he was experimenting with “making things up” and writing a few story outlines.
And so, a year later, another telephone call came from RKO, this time about an article he’d written, “Close to the Edge,” about a psychiatrist specializing in talking leapers out of jumping, who, as it turns out, was battling his own demons. They offered him seven grand for the film
rights and to adapt the article into a script.
Sasha said yes.
And what he couldn’t fully articulate but had started to feel in every particle was that California promised space, as if time could be stretched and elongated out there, and in its velvety emptiness he could re-create himself. No one would know he didn’t have a father. No one would know his mother had worked in a sweatshop sewing buttons onto jackets, lace onto collars. No one would know he was an immigrant kid who had struggled to lose his Russian accent in grade school, or that the other boys threw gravel at him on the playground, and when he came home with a black eye, his mother demanded in Yiddish, “Who did that to you? Tell me who.”
* * *
• • •
The night before he left, he sat with his mother at the kitchen table. Her face, wan beneath the shaded lamp hanging from the ceiling, echoed with more than just his leaving for California. It was the same unsettled, absent expression that he recognized from childhood, as if a ghost were hovering between them. He felt the urge to ask about his father, about the war he was born into, about the details of their life in the old country that she intentionally blurred. He hunched forward, sitting on his hands, readying himself to broach the subject, when she pushed the plate toward him. “Here, eat.” It was a herring sandwich on rye bread that she had just prepared.
Sasha stood up and folded his arms around her, and for a moment a thick, strained silence settled over them until he broke the tension by joking that she could always come with him to California.
Leah sighed, her body softening. “What would an old woman do in California?”
Those Who Are Saved Page 3