Chains Around the Grass

Chains Around the Grass

Ragen, Naomi

(2013)

Chains Around the Grass

Naomi Ragen

Also by Naomi Ragen:

Jephte’s Daughter
Sotah
The Sacrifice of Tamar
The Ghost of Hannah Mendes
The Covenant
The Saturday Wife
The Tenth Song
The Sisters Weiss
Women’s Minyan (a play)

Copyright © Naomi Ragen, 1995

The right of Naomi Ragen to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988.

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 or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.

This is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogues are products of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

For My Brothers

Prologue

Queens, New York. February, 1955

There Sara sits on the new blue carpeting in the house of the uncle she hardly knows, playing with the two little girls they’ve told her are her cousins. She’s taken in their frilly party dresses, their smug delight. They hold grown-up dolls with diamond earrings and high-heeled shoes close to their chests until an “aunt” with hatefully pitying eyes hisses at them, “Share!”

Grudgingly, they do.

These are their dolls, their house, their new blue carpeting. That is very clear to her. Acutely aware of the cost to her dignity, she nevertheless surrenders, accepting the doll with the humility of a beggar. She dresses and undresses it. For so many years—perhaps her whole life—she will play and replay that scene with shame, harder on herself than need be, overlaying it with a knowledge she never had at the time: she will never be able to forgive that image of ignorant bliss, that joyful dressing and undressing of the doll with breasts all the while her father was being buried.

“Passed away,” is all they told her, her uncle and her mother sitting in the front seat of the uncle’s new car that was to take them from the housing project in Queens to suburban Long Island. She sat in the back between her brothers thinking: ridiculous, impossible. She didn’t cry. Instead, her fingers dug vengefully into the new upholstery, trying—but failing—to make a hole.

For years to come, her peace sacrificed to well-meaning fools who couldn’t bear to watch a child see her father buried, she will look out of windows, searching for him, like Shirley Temple in The Little Princess watching for soldiers back from the battle of Mafeking. But unlike Shirley, she will not stamp her little foot and shake her pretty curls, adorably insisting, “He isn’t dead, I tell you!” She will not move at all, sitting by the window on the seventh floor of the ugly red brick housing project in Queens.

Only forty-five years later, her mother newly buried, a grandmother herself, will she stand by her father’s grave, believing it. She will bury her head in the soft, heavy middle of the brother she has been angry at for forty years, weeping loudly. “We needed help,” she’ll cry. “And there was no one to help us!” Embarrassed (she is always, it seems, embarrassing him and he, her), her brother will nevertheless embrace her, sending his stunned grown sons hurriedly back to wait in the car. Only then will she have that insight that has eluded her so long, allowing her to see beyond the six-foot bully with the mean mouth and hard hand. She will be able to glimpse in him, once more, the angry, grieving twelve year old; see him as someone’s little boy, orphaned, at the age of her youngest child, her baby. Only then will she realize that out of all those alive on the planet only he can at that moment understand her perfectly.

There it is, the opening door, the bitter cold rush of February air chilling the overheated room of the suburban house that has so impressed the child and her mother. And there is the mother, long awaited, a little unstable in the black high heels, uncomfortable in the borrowed hat. She does not, and has never, owned a hat of her own. She pulls up the black veil that covers her tear-stained face.

“Where were you? Why did you leave me?” Sara sobs into her mother’s black-skirted thighs, her arms like a tourniquet about Ruth’s knees. The mother’s answer has been lost to time and memory. Only the smell of earth, and the chilled fibers of her woolen coat remain behind, intact, as solid as any tombstone.

Chapter one

New Jersey, 1953

When the excitement and dread in David Markowitz’s stomach went one level higher, finally waking him, he perceived it as joy. He looked over at his wife, cupping her breast affectionately, but hearing her deep, satisfied breathing, thought better of it. She must be so tired after all that packing, he thought. Another move. Besides, he couldn’t waste the time. There was too much to do. The movers were due at five, and he had come home the night before too tired to check whether Ruth had got everything ready for them. He would do it now. After just one cup of coffee. He needed that one cup. After that he was a dynamo. One cup was all that it took to transform him from a weary laborer into a tireless capitalist.

Today there was only the one cab, barely two weeks old, still smelling brand new, but in two years, three at the most, there would be a second and then a third, so that by the time Jesse finished high school there would be a whole fleet of them prowling the streets of New York City, gathering up passengers and dollars without end.

Then they would move again, this time into a picture book house of their own, on a quiet tree-lined street in one of the smarter suburbs. Ruth would be happy, finally. A home of her own, a backyard in which the children could play on their own, expensive jungle gym, perhaps a fancy temple nearby where she could join the Sisterhood and listen to the handsome young rabbi’s pious and tiresome sermons. But for now, there was the temporary hardship that they would just have to endure—let his wife and son understand this already! All the money from the sale of the candy store in Newark had gone into the cab, and until they could save up for a down payment on their dream house, they would have to live in a—(his mind searched, restless, for a way to finesse it, to turn the low-income housing project in the Rockaways into something nicer, the way they did in commercials: “a beach front development”, perhaps? But the word “project” stuck in his mind, like a grease stain, practically impossible to transform.) Well, he shrugged, comforting himself, at least it was new, brand new. And besides, it was only temporary.

They didn’t like the idea one bit, not Ruth and not Jesse, the only one of the kids old enough to give him trouble (or support, but that was too much to ask, wasn’t it?). Sara would be fine as long as they packed all her dolls. She was an open and curious child, and would soon make new little friends, he felt sure. And the baby, well it would hardly matter to him where his crib was. But there was no way even David Markowitz could milk any optimism from the reaction of his first-born. He wasn’t kidding himself. Jesse wasn’t just a sulking kid; he was downright bitter. It had something to do with leaving all those pimply-faced friends of his—the same kids he had called “wops and micks” when they first got to Jersey. Now, having to give them up was suddenly the end of the world. Go figure kids! But he was too fair to swap his guilt over uprooting the boy for anger over his son’s irritating unhappiness. Well, of course he couldn’t be expected to understand what a man has to do in this world. That required a certain maturity, and he was still young. One day he would respect his father’s decision and understand the wisdom of it, but that day wouldn’t come for many years. In the meantime, Dave told himself firmly, ignoring the spasm of painful guilt, the kid would just have to accept his fate.

But Ruth was a different story. She had no reason not to be glad. How many times had she bent his ear with the wonderful information that they were practically the only Jewish family in the neighborhood? Just like her to see everything, big and small, through the same set of glasses. The world could be coming to an end and all she would want to know is what time she had to light candles on Friday night. Just like her to let him make all the decisions, all the arrangements for moving and then to suddenly protest: “Where is the shul?” So he had shlepped back and searched the neighborhood and lucky for him he had found one. A million years old, built when the summer houses that surrounded it had been filled with prosperous Jewish businessmen and their plump wives from Prospect Park and the Grand Concourse, instead of Black welfare families. They hardly had the ten odd geezers you needed for the minyan, but still, it was a shul, with an old rabbi with a gray beard and an accent you could cut with a knife. That, he’d thought, ought to make her happy.

It didn’t.

What about a school for Jesse? she’d asked next. There was a school, of course, a perfectly fine junior and senior high school named after some unmemorable, portly US president. But that wasn’t what she meant, he knew. Will he have nice friends—nice Jewish boys like himself? That was what she really wanted to know. Truthfully, he had no idea. But a few miles away, where the projects were only a dim memory of the landscape that flashed by on the way to the city, there were single-family homes on quarter acre lots with lots of nice Jewish families who sent their children to an expensive Hebrew Day School. He had nothing against that, in principle. In fact, he looked forward to the day he could join them. But all that would just have to wait. Anyhow, Jesse had been perfectly happy in his public school in Jersey, and he couldn’t see why it wasn’t good enough for him here, too, at the new place. What did Ruth want? That he spend his time learning to pray? Better he should spend it learning to add.

Dave sat up suddenly in the dark room, awash in a sudden swell of happiness that surged up, despite misgivings, from deep inside him. He couldn’t understand his son’s bitterness, his wife’s hesitations. He himself loved movement, pulling up stakes. If someone had asked him point blank what he really wanted to be, and he had possessed the self-awareness to answer with absolute candor, he would have said the leader of a wagon train crossing the prairies to California: adventurous wild winds in his hair, shoulder to shoulder with other brave men, smiling with fortitude, urging the women and children forward kindly, getting them to dance and sing around the campfire.

This was the third—no—he caught himself, determined to face his crimes honestly, knowing that it would allow him to then enjoy himself in peace—no, the fourth move in ten years. The wife and children weren’t dancing around the campfire anymore. He laid back in bed, lifting his pajama top and kneading the suddenly quickening ulcers above his stomach, ulcers he had had since his childhood. No one had minded the first move. He closed his eyes and there it was again. Amboy Street in Brooklyn. The stench of overflowing garbage bins. The melting, tar-covered rooftops. The billowing dust beaten out of rose-patterned pillows on fire escapes. Most of all, the unforgiving eyes of the fat women who looked out of their windows straight into yours. He could still hear them, like ludicrously bad actors on a terrible comedy show:

“Mikey!! Charlie!! You come up here. Mikeeeeeeeeeeeeeey!!!” The endless, intrusive chant of poverty.

What he had moved the family to next wasn’t much better, true. But at least the tiny Bronx walk-up had had a few trees, slightly less noise. And the low rent had allowed him to build up the little nest egg which had allowed him to ignore—for the first time in his life—his brother and sister and all his wife’s relations. Their combined warnings and handwringings, their demands for caution, for stability and moderation—for safety—had not budged his resolve. Instead, he had taken every red cent he owned or could borrow, and bought a candy store in Newark and moved them all to a town in Jersey with green lawns and little clapboard houses. Of course, that had not been his first choice. He thought of his brother Reuben for a moment. The sick regret was almost gone, now, five years later, leaving just a hopeless ache. Reuben had gotten lucky in the import business and then opened a plastics factory. He had taken in a stranger for a partner.