Streets of Gold (44 page)

Whenever a Veronica Lake movie is playing at the Tuxedo on Jerome Avenue, Rebecca stays away from it. But she goes to the movies every Saturday, and sometimes on Wednesday nights with her mother. Except for Veronica Lake, she loves the movies. She loves the way people meet in the movies. At the movies, she learns to identify all the families of the various studios; just name the studio and she will reel off the names of the contract players. She tries this phenomenal feat of memory on her father one night. She tells him that MGM, that’s Leo the Lion, has the biggest family in the bunch, with grandpas like Lionel Barrymore and Lewis Stone and C. Aubrey Smith and Guy Kibbee and Charles Winninger; and grandmas like Edna May Oliver and Fay Bainter and Marjorie Main; mothers and fathers like Greer Garson and Spencer Tracy and Margaret Sullavan and Herbert Marshall; uncles like William Powell and Robert Taylor and Franchot Tone; aunts like Joan Crawford and Laraine Day and Hedy Lamarr; cousins like Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland and Freddie Bartholomew, and
landsleit
from Far Rockaway, like Ruth Hussey, Nelson Eddy, Gladys George, Ann Sothern, and George Murphy.

The Warner Brothers family (she tells her father) is Humphrey Bogart, George Brent, Bette Davis, Olivia De Havilland, Errol Flynn, Ann Sheridan, Edward G. Robinson, Pat O’Brien, Donald Crisp, Priscilla Lane, Ida Lupino, James Cagney, and Ronald Reagan, whom she adores. And then there’s the Twentieth Century-Fox family with Alice Faye and Don Ameche and Linda Darnell and Tyrone Power and Henry Fonda and Cesar Romero and Warner Baxter and Sonja Henie and Shirley Temple (she passes over this name very quickly). The Paramount family is Betty Grable and Gary Cooper and Dorothy Lamour and Fred MacMurray and Claudette Colbert and Bob Hope and Bing Crosby on the road to everywhere, and sometimes people from the Columbia family or the Republic family pop up in a picture with one of the other studio families, and then it’s like one
big
family, Daddy, it’s really terrific, Daddy, she says, and grins at him.

“Daddy?” she says.

He does not answer.

“Daddy?”

Her father is asleep in his chair.

“Well,” she says, and goes to her room.

She is not permitted to date until she is seventeen years old, not that any boys are banging down the door. It is Davina, at thirteen, who is the undisputed beauty of the family, with cupcake breasts almost as large as Rebecca’s own, and wide hips, and a smile Rebecca considers suggestive. Whenever a boy comes to the house to pick up Rebecca, her sister magically appears in the living room, and extends her hand, and says in a low and studied voice (she is now imitating Lizabeth Scott), “Nice to meet you.” The boys invariably ask Rebecca how old her sister is. When she says “Thirteen,” they seem disappointed. It is only when she begins going steady with Marvin Feldman that she feels free enough to ask, “Do you think I’m prettier than Davina?”

“Yes,” he says.

“Do you think I have a big nose?”

“No,” he says.

“I sometimes think I ought to get my nose fixed.”

“What for?” he says. “It’s an okay nose,” and he kisses the tip of it.

From the bedroom, Sophie Baumgarten calls, “Rebecca?”

“Yes, Mama,” Rebecca says. She knows what is coming next.

“What time is it, Rebecca?” Sophie asks.

“A little past one, Mama.”

“Already?”
Sophie says.

In December of 1945, just before Chanukah, her grandfather Itzik dies. The last word he utters is “Rivke.” Though Rebecca knows this was also her grandmother’s name, she chooses to believe the old man’s dying breath was drawn for her alone. They bury him on a bleak gray afternoon, and that night Rebecca walks over to the small park near their apartment. Snow is on the ground. She sits on one of the benches with her hands in her coat pockets. The park is empty. She sits alone on the bench until she is shivering from the cold. Then, slowly, she walks back to the apartment.

Davina is listening to the radio.

“Hi,” she says.

Rebecca does not answer. In the hallway, she takes off her coat and her muffler, and hangs them in the closet.

“Where were you?” Davina asks.

“In the park.”

“Doing what?”

“Sitting.”

“That was something, huh? The funeral?”

On the radio, they are advertising gasoline. Davina sits in the big easy chair that is their father’s whenever he is home, her shapely legs tucked under her, her loafers on the floor, and she tells Rebecca what she thought of the funeral, how it was despicable of a rabbi who didn’t even
know
Grandpa Itzik to go on and on about him as if they were bosom buddies, and Tante Raizel wailing like a banshee when they lowered the coffin into the earth, Davina had never seen anything so horrible in her life. But her voice trails when the commercial ends and the comic comes on again. He tells a joke, and Davina bursts out laughing.

In her room, Rebecca takes off her clothes and gets into bed. She feels very much alone. Except for Marvin, she feels she is now alone in the world. There is only Marvin now to tell her that her nose is an okay nose. (“What is
that
, a nose job?” her grandfather had said. “There’s nothing wrong with your nose. That’s your grandmother Rivke’s nose. That’s a beautiful nose.”) It is not such a beautiful nose, she thinks. Grandpa, it really is not such a beautiful nose, Grandpa, I love you, Grandpa. Thank you, Grandpa. Thank you, Grandpa. I love you, Grandpa. She cries herself to sleep that night, and dreams that Marvin is making love to her. She screams in the dream, she tries to scream but no sound comes from her mouth. Stop, Marvin, she tries to scream, but Marvin will not, please, she screams, she tries to scream, Marvin, please, no, please, no, you
promised!
— and. she sits up straight in bed, her green eyes wide, breathing heavily as she stares into the blackness of the room.

“You promised,” she whispers, but she has already forgotten the dream.

In April, Marvin takes her for a walk in the park and tells her he’s met a singer, and tells her he is going to marry the singer, and tells her he is sorry. Jonquils are blooming everywhere around them, the small grassy slopes are running wild with jonquils.

“That’s okay, Marvin,” Rebecca tells him. “Really, it’s okay.”

It is Marvin who bursts into tears.

I loved you, Rebecca.

I loved everything about you.

I knew you were beautiful because Cappy Kaplan, my drummer, described you to me in detail, not that I needed any physical description. “She’s a very
zaftig
person,” Cappy said, “about five-six or seven, I can’t say for sure, and very nicely stacked, as if you didn’t know. Not melons or cantaloupes, Ike, just very nice, well, grapefruits, I would say, very nice. And wide hips, she’s very curvy, she looks like a peasant from the old country, you know, with the wide hips for childbearing. Her hair ain’t red exactly, it’s sort of rust-colored, I guess you’d call it, though maybe she gives it a little help. Her nose is nothing to write home about, a Jewish nose, it’s my cousin Carol’s nose exactly. Her mouth is okay, lips a little thin maybe, but she’s got good teeth. I’m sure she brushes them regular. She dresses good, too. I got to tell you the truth, Ike: standing next to her, you look like a slob.”

That was Cappy’s description of Rebecca Baumgarten.

My grandfather said, after their first meeting,
“Ha sembrato una settentrionale,”
meaning he thought she looked like a northern Italian. Years later, in Rome, the city of redheads, Rebecca was always being mistaken for Italian. And, of course, being pinched on the ass by Italian men. That is not a myth. Even Rebecca’s green death ray could not dissuade those hot-blooded Mediterraneans from trying to cop a feel.
La mano morta
is not a branch of the Mafia, even though it translates literally as “the dead hand.” The expression describes a hand hanging limply at the end of a male Italian wrist, seemingly deceased, most certainly detached from its owner, who claims no responsibility for whatever it might be doing while he stands on a comer reading his copy of the morning paper. What the hand is doing is simply none of his business. If a woman recoils from
la mano morta
with a small surprised gasp, the man to whom the dead hand is attached will look at her (
and
it) in surprise equal to the woman’s own.
La mano morta.
“Fucking
sex
fiends is what they are,” Rebecca said whenever we were in Rome. She also said that in London.

It was Rebecca’s guess that her father the Mad Oldsmobile Dealer was approximately as religious as my mother, and objected to me only because I was blind. I did not believe this for a minute. Not once had he expressed any concern about how a blind man might support his daughter, or protect her from harm, or keep her happy and secure. I flatly told Rebecca she was wrong. If I’d been a blind
Jew
, Abe would have welcomed me into the family, perhaps not without qualms and doubts, but certainly without enmity. “Well, then,” Rebecca said, “he must be doing it for Baumgarten Frocks.”

“Baumgarten Frocks” was Abe’s father, a dyspeptic old cloakie who lived in the back room of their Mosholu Parkway apartment, and made ugly noises in the bathroom each morning. Rebecca hated him as much as she had loved old Itzik. His real name was Moishe Baumgarten, but Rebecca alternately called him Baumgarten Frocks and Moishe Pipik. When she and I first started getting serious about each other, she sounded Moishe on the remote possibility of marrying an Italian musician. The sly old fox knew all about me by then, of course, had in fact received gleeful reports from Honest Abe on the demolition of the blind goy in his kitchen that hot August afternoon. He listened to Rebecca and then began nodding his head in his best
daven
ing manner, and, as though he were reciting the
shachris
, the
minchah
, and the
mairev
(not to mention the
Nina
, the
Pinta
, and the
Santa Maria
), said to his granddaughter, “Ahhh, Rivke, Rivke, how can you even con
sid
eh such a peth for yourself? Ah pianeh playeh? Ah
shaygets
? Rivke, Rivke,” wagging that fine old prejudice-riddled head, “you could merry vun day ah doctuh,” he said, “ah lawyeh,” he said, and leaving the finest profession of all for last, triumphantly concluded, “ah
biz
nessmen!” When Rebecca told me this story, I told her old Baumgarten Frocks could go frock himself.

That’s the way we felt about
all
of them, in fact.

I think if my own grandfather had raised the slightest objection to my marrying Rebecca, I’d have kissed
him
off, too. I mean that. I loved you, Rebecca, and it had nothing to do with descriptions of you. I knew you were beautiful long before anyone told me. Anyway, you’d told me so yourself, hadn’t you? “I’m gorgeous,” you said, “what do you think?” You
were
gorgeous, Rebecca. I loved everything about you. It’s too easy now to remember only the bad times, of which there were many. But there were good times, too — at least as many, and perhaps more — and I loved you thoroughly and completely for more years than I care to count.

How did I love thee, Becks? Let me count the ways.

I had told my grandfather all about you long before I took you to the tailor shop to meet him. I was taking no chances. I enumerated for him all the things I am about to enumerate now, all the reasons for loving you, and he listened patiently, and sometimes made pleased little sounds, encouraging me to go on. I told him first that you were beautiful, and then I told him you were the smartest person I’d ever met, that you could read through a book in an hour, sometimes two, but never longer than that, and retain what you had read, and reel off to me long passages you had memorized from just that single reading. I told him you knew impossibly ridiculous things, facts no one was expected to know, and which you probably wouldn’t have known if it weren’t for a memory that was almost photographic. I told him you could recite statistics on the area and population of Chile, for example, or list in order all the rulers of France since Pepin the Short; I told him you knew what to call the male, female, and baby animals in any of the animal families — as for instance, a drake, a duck, and a duckling; or a ram, a ewe, and a lamb; or, more exotically, a cob, a pen, and a cygnet. I told him you could, for God’s sake, name the methods of execution in every state of the Union — lethal gas in Arizona, hanging in Montana, electrocution in South Dakota, and so on. I told him (I had not yet told him you were Jewish) that you could even name all the popes in order, starting with Saint Peter and coming all the way up to Pius XII, who was the then-reigning pontiff. I was amazed by your knowledge, I told him, and I bet him that when you finally met, you’d be able to tell him the average yearly rainfall in every province of Italy. (“Even Potenza?” he asked, undoubtedly impressed.)

I told him how kind you were, and how generous, how sometimes we’d be walking along together and a panhandler would approach, and you’d catch your breath and stop in the middle of the sidewalk as though someone had suddenly slapped you, and I would hear you opening your pocketbook, and after you gave the man a coin, you would say to me, “We’re so lucky, Ike,” even though I was blind. My blindness never mattered to you. I told him how concerned you were about all the people of the world, Rebecca, not just the ones in your own family, and not just your close friends (I told him about your unswerving loyalty to Shirley Ackerman, too), but also people in faraway lands you’d never seen. I told him about the argument we’d had the time I was reminiscing about my boyhood and mentioned that my mother was always telling me to eat what was on my plate because the people in China were starving, and I admitted I didn’t
care
if the people in China were starving and you hit the ceiling, Rebecca, and wanted to know how
I
, of
all
people, could be so cruel and callous to those less fortunate. (“Well, Ignazio,” my grandfather said, “it
isn’t
funny, the people in China starving.”) I told him you’d call me sometimes late at night and read poetry to me on the telephone, I told him you’d taken me to the Museum of Modern Art and described your favorite paintings in meticulous detail, I told him you’d begun advising me on how to dress, I told him you played piano very badly (by your own admission, Becks), but that you’d always wanted to marry someone creative, and that you’d said marrying me would be the most important event in your life. I told him how much I loved you, Rebecca. I told him all the things there were to love about you, and they were myriad.