A Book of Great Worth (12 page)

“That’s too dizzying an abstraction for this poor lamb,” she said, and began to move away.

His hand on her arm brought her up short. “Wait.” He looked embarrassed by his abrupt gesture. “I’d like to see you again.”

“Again? I’m just going across the room to have a canapé. My stomach is growling. Look over there in a moment and you’ll see me.”

“I mean,” Aaron said, twisting his resolve, “again, after this. Some place else. Perhaps we could have a meal.”

“I don’t like to cook,” Rebeccah said with suspicion.

“I mean in a restaurant,” he said in sudden English, as if it were a secret he wanted no one overhearing to understand.

She took a step back and looked him over, from the top of his sandy brown hair, neatly parted in the centre of his well-shaped head, down along the smooth contour of brow, nose, cleanly chiselled mouth and chin, the starched white collar, down the perfectly tied necktie, the immaculate linen jacket, pausing for a moment at his crotch, where, despite the loose drape of his trousers, she believed she saw a barely perceptible movement, then down the crease of the trousers to the glimmering black wings of his oxfords, then up again, letting her eyes take their time while he stood motionless, waiting their verdict. “I want you to know,” she said finally, “that you represent just about everything that I detest and abhor about this society, capitalism at its most rapacious, mercantilism at its basest, petty bourgeoisie mentality at its narrowest, dandyism, masculine superiority, class and sexual arrogance...” Her hand darted out from her side in a palm-up gesture of dismay, as if she were overwhelmed by the enormity of the list she was prepared to recite, but her voice trailed off.

Aaron observed her with the same aloof detachment she had spent on him, a small smile seeping into his lips, and he shrugged, a shrug coloured with a boldness that made her think she had, perhaps, been wrong. “I may represent those things,” he said. “I think you’re wrong, but I won’t argue with you now, here. I may
represent
them, but that wouldn’t necessarily mean I
am
them. You
are
wrong there.”

Four days later, he showed up at the department store where she worked as a window dresser, resplendent in a blue and white striped gabardine suit and a straw hat, a bouquet of flowers in his freshly manicured hand. “We’re in the same business,” he said as he greeted her with the flow of employees through the staff entrance at six o’clock.

“Not exactly. You sell, I decorate, though I’ll concede there’s a connection. More importantly, you own, I toil.” But she was pleased to see him, flattered by the flowers he now proffered, making a gallant sort of dip with his head and shoulders, his free hand behind his back.

“The same business just the same. Mercantilism at its basest. And the fact that you’re a Williams had nothing to do, I suppose, with your getting a job at Loew’s.”

“I’m not a Williams,” Rebeccah said fiercely. “I’m a Kristol.”

“Excuse me, no disrespect meant to the memory of your father, who I’m told was a fine man. I regret I never had the pleasure of meeting him. Working here rather than in the family store eases the conscience, don’t you agree?”

Rebeccah let a smile slowly form. “That’s a contradiction I’m still grappling with, yes.” She observed him coolly, conscious of the slight pressure at the back of her neck caused by having to tilt her head upward to meet his eyes. “I don’t know that meeting my father would have been a pleasure for you, though. He was a man who said what he thought.”

“Like his daughter?”

“Like his daughter, yes.”

“There’s no accounting for taste,” Aaron said, with a light laugh. “Don’t you agree?”

He took her to as good a restaurant as was possible, considering the way she was dressed, and afterwards to a place on the lake where they drank wine and danced. He took her home in his automobile, a cream-coloured Packard with shimmering chrome, and, on the street gazed thoughtfully up at the dark windows of her loft, which was on the upper floor of a building that had once been a warehouse and was now honeycombed with small apartments. “You must be lonely there,” he said with warmth.

“Not really,” Rebeccah answered dryly, considering the options that faced her now. “There are ghosts.”

But he didn’t ask to come up, didn’t make a move to kiss her good night. Instead, he offered his hand and shook hers vigorously.

After that, they saw each other often, dining out, dancing, attending the theatre and concerts, going to the museum and galleries. He had little interest in art,
he admitted, and a tin ear, but he seemed happy to
accompany her wherever she wished to go, and ex
pressed an interest in learning about the many things for which she had passions. He even, on the two or three occasions when she took him, after the theatre, to a nearby café for coffee and pastries, endured the thinly veiled
insults of her friends. Rebeccah made no attempt to de
fend him and watched thoughtfully as he gingerly fended off Belle’s parries, like a man wearing white gloves suddenly handed something slick and foul smelling.

After two months, she was summoned to her Aunt
Ruth’s for Friday dinner. “And Aaron?” Aunt Ruth in
quired after the dishes had been washed and Uncle Avrom had taken the dog and his pipe for a stroll in the late summer evening. The two women sat in the kitchen, drinking cool tea in the flickering candlelight.

“Aaron? That name sounds familiar. Wasn’t he a fellow in the Bible?”

“The Bible! You’ve heard of that, Miss Fancypants, what a surprise.”

“My father mentioned it once or twice, said it was suitable for use as kindling, if dead leaves were not close at hand.”

“Your father! God rest his soul. He probably did say that. You like him?”

“My father? Of course I liked him.” Aunt Ruth had been her mother’s closest sister, and Rebeccah had a special affection for her, visiting often since her mother’s death. But this was the first time she’d known her to intrude.

“Aaron! Oh, you
know
who I mean. Aaron Greenspun. The man is crazy about you and you don’t know who he is.”

“Oh, Mr. Goldspun.”

“It’s Greenspun, dear.”

“I know, Aunt Ruth. That’s just a little joke.”

“A joke! The man wants to marry you and you make jokes about his name that should be your name soon.”

Rebeccah stared at her aunt for a moment, then laughed. “Marry me? Aunt Ruth, the man has only kissed me once, and that so softly it felt like a butterfly batting its wings against my lips. And
that
only because it was my birthday. When he escorts me home after an evening together he shakes my hand like it was the handle of a pump and he was dying of thirst.”

“The man is a gentleman,” Aunt Ruth said sternly. “You don’t appreciate that, but you’ll learn to.”

“The man is beautiful but hollow,” Rebeccah re
torted. “He’s like that candle, flickering, precious, hypnotic if you let yourself look too long, but of no substance.” She leaned over and, as if to demonstrate her point, brushed her hand through the small flame, extinguishing it.

“Candles!” Aunt Ruth snorted through her nose. “You’re burning yours at both ends, Miss Fancypants. Are you twenty-six now, or is it twenty-seven?”

Rebeccah wrinkled her nose to show her displeasure, but kept her voice soft. “Twenty-five, thank you, just as of three weeks ago, as you well know, since you sent me that lovely crinoline robe.” She paused, tilting her chin up slightly. “You
witch
. I thought that was an odd gift to be coming from you. You’re preparing my trousseau, aren’t you?”

“Your mother, God rest her soul, isn’t here to look after you. You’re incapable of doing it yourself, so someone has to. It’s a burden, but I take it happily,
Bubala
.”

The two women stared at each other through the growing darkness that had pounced on the room when the candle went out. Finally, Rebeccah blinked. “What do you mean, he wants to marry me?”

“Just that. Would it be plainer if I spoke in English?”

“You’re crazy, Aunt Ruth. Forgive me for saying so. How do you dream of such things?”

“There’s no dreaming, Miss Fancypants. The man said so himself.”

“Said so. To whom? You?”

“Not to me, of course, silly,” Aunt Ruth said. “To Uncle Meyer. He was a bit flummoxed, the poor man, his nose always in the store’s books, he hardly knows there’s a real world spinning around him, he asked me to have a word with you, and your Uncle Avrom to look after things. Oh, for goodness sake, Rebeccah, sit back down.”

Rebeccah was on her feet, her hands closing into small, tight fists at her side. “He told Uncle Meyer he wanted to marry me? Aaron Greenspun did that?”

“Of course he did,
Bubala
. Now sit down.”

She was speechless, words spinning around in her mind but failing properly to lodge on her tongue, like gears in a machine that won’t engage. Worse, she felt, inexplicably, a profound sense of shame, as if she had been caught out in some disgusting betrayal, and blood rushed to her cheeks, making her feel faint. “Who...who...” she stammered.

“Who does he think he is? A gentleman, that’s who.” Aunt Ruth put her hand on Rebeccah’s wrist and tugged at it until she sat down. “Let me ask you this, Miss Modern Woman, Miss Artist and Literary Type. If your father, God rest his soul, were alive, and if Aaron Greenspun or any other man, I mean any other man of breeding and manners, this isn’t your friends like Morgenstern or that actor I’m talking about, but men who still have the old country in their minds and hearts, if such a man wanted to marry you and your father was alive, wouldn’t you expect such a man to have the cour
tesy of talking to your father.
Not
” – she held up a si
lencing hand – “to ask permission, just to inform. Wouldn’t you expect that? Wouldn’t you even, maybe, be hurt, just a little, if such a man didn’t do that, Miss Head-in-the-Clouds?”

Rebeccah allowed that maybe she would, “if it was that type of man, yes, maybe. Not if Morgenstern didn’t do it.” And she laughed at that thought, of my father paying a courtesy call.

“Well, what an admission! But Mr. Greenspun
is
that sort of man. He’s a gentleman and an old country man. And wait, wait just a second, darling, let me ask you one more thing. Since your father, God rest his soul,
isn’t
here, wouldn’t it be proper then for Mr. Greenspun to talk to some other member of the Kristol family, if there was one nearby? Your father’s brother, Mort, maybe, except that he lives a thousand miles away?”

Rebeccah nodded slowly.

“So, all right. Your father, God rest his soul, isn’t alive, nor, God rest her soul, is your mother, my darling Rebeccah, and your father’s brother and other relatives are a thousand miles away. So whom should Mr. Greenspun talk to about his intentions but your Uncle Meyer. Woolly headed though he is, he
is
the head of the Williams family, your mother’s people.”

“He could have talked to
me
, damn it,” Rebeccah said in English.

Aunt Ruth smiled and patted Rebeccah’s hand, which had grown cold. “He will,
Bubala
, he will. As soon as I tell him you’d like him to. Oh, come on, come on. He’s a gentleman, I keep telling you. And maybe just a little bit shy, too.”

Rebeccah went home and, over the next three days, as she brushed her teeth and combed her hair, as she steamed her vegetables for dinner, as she painted, standing nude under the skylights of her loft, she contemplated her life. She was, in fact, twenty-five years old, and, as her father had died at sixty-eight, her mother at sixty-three, she was well into what was likely the second third of her life. There had been no money left after her mother’s illness, so her father’s wispy promises that maybe, someday, she would go to art
school had entirely evaporated. She had delayed her de
parture to New York and points further on so long that, now, the thought of leaving Cleveland terrified her. And, worse yet, the paintings she had done, piled up like neatly stacked picket signs waiting the next strike in her father’s old office at the union hall, even the painting she was working on now, were shit, no
other word for it, in Yiddish, English or any other lan
guage. She sighed, lit another cigarette and went to stand in front of her one concession to vanity, a full-length mirror she had justified when she bought it as essential to her study of anatomy. She stood there, in the bright, white northern light streaming down from
the ceiling window, for a long time, observing the be
ginning sag of her breasts, the little puckering of skin along her belly.

On the third day, Monday, when Aaron came to call for her at the store, she found herself looking at him more closely than usual,
examining
him, with her painter’s eye, as if looking for defects to match the ones she had found in herself. He had shaven within the hour and there were tiny pinpricks of dried blood clustered along the firm line of his jaw, but his cheeks and neck, when she reached across the table suddenly to stroke them, taking him aback and bringing a pleased, bashful smile to his strong mouth, were smooth as a baby’s. His yellow eyes glistened like those of a cat watching the progress of a mouse across the room, and she had to admit he was simply beautiful, as flawless as a baby that had not yet begun to puncture its possibilities. But, at the same time, he was hollow, as she had told her aunt, filled with vapid observations about the weather, the people who worked for him in his shop, the politics of the city. Two weeks before, she remembered, after the theatre, an Ibsen play, his only comment had been a vague “What a way to live.”