The Collected Stories (23 page)

When Faith thinks of her mother and father in any year, young or impersonally aged, she notices that they are squatting on the shore, staring with light eyes at the white waves. Then Faith feels herself so damply in the swim of things that she considers crawling Channels and Hellesponts and even taking a master's degree in education in order to exult at last in a profession and get out of the horseshit trades of this lofty land.

Certain facts may become useful. The Darwins moved to Coney Island for the air. There was not enough air in Yorkville, where the grandmother had been planted among German Nazis and Irish bums by Faith's grandfather, who soon departed alone in blue pajamas, for death.

Her grandmother pretended she was German in just the same way that Faith pretends she is an American. Faith's mother flew in the fat face of all that and, once safely among her own kind in Coney Island, learned real Yiddish, helped Faith's father, who was not so good at foreign languages, and as soon as all the verbs and necessary nouns had been collected under the roof of her mouth, she took an oath to expostulate in Yiddish and grieve only in Yiddish, and she has kept that oath to this day.

Faith has only visited her parents once since she began to understand that because of Ricardo she would have to be unhappy for a while. Faith really is an American and she was raised up like everyone else to the true assumption of happiness.

No doubt about it, squinting in any direction she is absolutely miserable. She is ashamed of this before her parents. “You should get help,” says Hope. “Psychiatry was invented for people like you, Faithful,” says Charles. “My little blondie, life is short. I'll lay out a certain amount of cash,” says her father. “When will you be a person,” says her mother.

Their minds are on matters. Severed Jerusalem; the Second World War still occupies their arguments; peaceful uses of atomic energy (is it necessary altogether?); new little waves of anti-Semitism lap the quiet beaches of their accomplishment.

They are naturally disgusted with Faith and her ridiculous position right in the middle of prosperous times. They are ashamed of her willful unhappiness.

All right! Shame then! Shame on them all!

That Ricardo, Faith's first husband, was a sophisticated man. He was proud and happy because men liked him. He was really, he said, a man's man. Like any true man's man, he ran after women too. He was often seen running, in fact, after certain young women on West Eighth Street or leaping little fences in Bedford Mews to catch up with some dear little pussycat.

He called them pet names, which generally referred to certain flaws in their appearance. He called Faith Baldy, although she is not and never will be bald. She is fine-haired and fair, and regards it as part of the lightness of her general construction that when she gathers her hair into an ordinary topknot, the stuff escapes around the contour of her face, making her wisp-haired and easy to blush. He is now living with a shapely girl with white round arms and he calls her Fatty.

When in New York, Faith's first husband lives within floating distance of the Green Coq, a prospering bar where he is well known and greeted loudly as he enters, shoving his current woman gallantly before. He introduces her around—hey, this is Fatty or Baldy. Once there was Bugsy, dragged up from the gutter where she loved to roll immies with Russell the bartender. Then Ricardo, to save her from becoming an old tea bag (his joke), hoisted her on the pulpy rods of his paperbacked culture high above her class, and she still administers her troubles from there, poor girl, her knees gallivanting in air.

Bugsy lives forever behind the Homey curtain of Faith's mind, a terrible end, for she used to be an ordinarily reprehensible derelict, but by the time Ricardo had helped her through two abortions and one lousy winter, she became an alcoholic and a whore for money. She soon gave up spreading for the usual rewards, which are an evening's companionship and a weekend of late breakfasts.

Bugsy was before Faith. Ricardo agreed to be Faith's husband for a couple of years anyway, because Faith in happy overindulgence had become pregnant. Almost at once, she suffered a natural miscarriage, but it was too late. They had been securely married by the state for six weeks when that happened, and so, like the gentleman he may very well be, he resigned himself to her love—a medium-sized, beefy-shouldered man, Indian-black hair, straight and coarse to the fingers, lavender eyes—Faith is perfectly willing to say it herself, to any good listener: she loved Ricardo. She began indeed to love herself, to love the properties which, for a couple of years anyway, extracted such heart-warming activity from him.

Well, Faith argues whenever someone says, “Oh really, Faithy, what do you mean—love?” She must have loved Ricardo. She had two boys with him. She had them to honor him and his way of loving when sober. He believed and often shouted out loud in the Green Coq, that Newcastle into which he reeled every night, blind with coal, that she'd had those kids to make him a bloody nine-to-fiver.

Nothing, said Faith in those simple days, was further from her mind. For her public part, she had made reasoned statements in the playground, and in the A&P while queued up for the cashier, that odd jobs were a splendid way of making out if you had together agreed on a substandard way of life. For, she explained to the ladies in whom she had confided her entire life, how can a man know his children if he is always out working? How true, that is the trouble with children today, replied the ladies, wishing to be her friend, they never see their daddies.

“Mama.” Faith said, the last time she visited the Children of Judea. “Ricardo and I aren't going to be together so much anymore.”

“Faithy!” said her mother. “You have a terrible temper. No, no. listen to me. It happens to many people in their lives. He'll be back in a couple of days. After all. the children … just say you're sorry. It isn't even a hill of beans. Nonsense. I thought he was much improved when he was here a couple of months ago. Don't give it a thought. Clean up the house, put in a steak. Tell the children be a little quiet, send them next door for the television. He'll be home before you know it. Don't pay attention. Do up your hair something special. Papa would be more than glad to give you a little cash. We're not poverty-stricken, you know. You only have to tell us you want help. Don't worry. He'll walk in the door tomorrow. When you get home, he'll be turning on the hi-fi.”

“Oh, Mama. Mama, he's tone deaf.”

“Ai, Faithy, you have to do your life a little better than this.”

They sat silently together, their eyes cast down by shame. The doorknob rattled. “My God, Hegel-Shtein,” whispered Mrs. Darwin. “Ssh, Faith, don't tell Hegel-Shtein. She thinks everything is her business. Don't even leave a hint.”

Mrs. Hegel-Shtein, president of the Grandmothers' Wool Socks Association, rolled in on oiled wheelchair wheels. She brought a lapful of multicolored wool in skeins. She was an old lady. Mrs. Darwin was really not an old lady. Mrs. Hegel-Shtein had organized this Active Association because children today wear cotton socks all winter. The grandmothers who lose heat at their extremities at a terrible clip are naturally more sensitive to these facts than the present avocated generation of mothers.

“Shalom, darling.” said Mrs. Darwin to Mrs. Hegel-Shtein. “How's tricks?” she asked bravely.

“Aah.” said Mrs. Hegel-Shtein. “Mrs. Essie Shifer resigned on account of her wrists.”

“Really? Well, let her come sit with us. Company is healthy.”

“Please, please, what's the therapy value if she only sits? Phooey!” said Mrs. Hegel-Shtein. “Excuse me, don't tell me that's Faith. Faith? Imagine that. Hope I know, but this is really Faith So it turns out you really have a little time to see your mother … What luck for her you won't be busy forever.”

“Oh, Gittel. I beg you, be quiet,” Faith's mortified mother said. “I must beg you. Faith comes when she can. She's a mother. She has two little small boys. She works. Did you forget. Gittel, what it was like in those days when they're little babies? Who comes first? The children … the little children, they come first.”

“Sure, sure, first. I know all about first. Didn't Archie come first? I had a big honor. I got a Christmas card from Florida from Mr. and Mrs. First. Listen to me, foolish people. I went by them to stay in the summer place, in the woods, near rivers. Only it got no ventilation, the whole place smells from termites and the dog. Please. I beg him, please, Mr. First. I'm a old woman, be sorry for me, I need extra air, leave your door open, I beg, I beg. No, not a word. Bang, every night eleven o'clock, the door gets shut like a rock. For a ten-minute business they close themselves up a whole night long.

“I'm better off in a old ladies' home. I told them. Nobody there is ashamed of a little cross ventilation.”

Mrs. Darwin blushed. Faith said. “Don't be such a clock watcher, Mrs. Hegel-Shtein.”

Mrs. Hegel-Shtein, who always seemed to know Faith better than Faith knew Mrs. Hegel-Shtein, said, “All right, all right. You're here, Faithy, don't be lazy. Help out. Here. Hold it, this wool on your hands, your mama will make a ball.” Faith didn't mind She held the wool out on her arms. Mrs. Darwin twisted and turned it round and round. Mrs. Hegel-Shtein directed in a loud voice, wheeling back and forth and pointing out serious mistakes. “Celia, Celia,” she cried, “it should be rounder, you're making a square. Faithy, be more steadier. Move a little. You got infantile paralysis?”

“More wool, more wool,” said Mrs. Darwin, dropping one completed ball into a shopping bag. They were busy as bees in a ladies' murmur about life and lives. They worked. They took vital facts from one another and looked as dedicated as a kibbutz.

The door to Mr. and Mrs. Darwin's room had remained open. Old bearded men walked by, thumbs linked behind their backs, all alike, the leftover army of the Lord. They had stuffed the morning papers under their mattresses, and because of the sorrowful current events they hurried up to the Temple of Judea on the sixth floor, from which they could more easily communicate with God. Ladies leaned on sticks stiffly, their articulations jammed with calcium. They knocked on the open door and said, “Oi, busy …” or “Mrs. Hegel-Shtein, don't you ever stop?” No one said much to Faith's mother, the vice-president of the Grandmothers' Wool Socks Association.

Hope had warned her: “Mother, you are only sixty-five years old. You look fifty-five.” “Youth is in the heart, Hopey. I feel older than Grandma. It's the way I'm constituted. Anyway Papa is practically seventy, he deserves a rest. We have some advantage that we're young enough to make a good adjustment. By the time we're old and miserable. it'll be like at home here.” “Mother, you'll certainly be an object of suspicion, an interloper, you'll have enemies everywhere.” Hope had been sent to camp lots of years as a kid; she knew a thing or two about group living.

Opposite Faith, her mother swaddled the fat turquoise balls in more and more turquoise wool. Faith swayed gently back and forth along with her outstretched wool-wound arms. It hurt her most filial feelings that, in this acute society, Mrs. Hegel-Shtein should be sought after, admired, indulged …

“Well, Ma, what do you hear from the neighborhood?” Faith asked. She thought they could pass some cheery moments before the hovering shadow of Ricardo shoved a fat thumb in her eye.

“Ah, nothing much,” Mrs. Darwin said.

“Nothing much?” asked Mrs. Hegel-Shtein. “I heard you correctly said nothing much? You got a letter today from Slovinsky family, your heart stuck in your teeth, Celia, you want to hide this from little innocent Faith. Little baby Faithy. Ssh. Don't tell little children? Hah?”

“Gittel, I must beg you. I have reasons. I must beg you, don't mix in. Oh, I must beg you, Gittel, not to push anymore, I want to say nothing much on this subject.”

“Idiots!” Mrs. Hegel-Shtein whispered low and harsh.

“Did you really hear from the Slovinskys, Mama, really? Oh, you know I'm always interested in Tessie. Oh, you remember what a lot of fun Tess and I used to have when we were kids. I liked her. I never didn't like her.” For some reason Faith addressed Mrs. Hegel-Shtein: “She was a very beautiful girl.”

“Oh, yeh, beautiful. Young. Beautiful. Very old story. Naturally. Gittel, you stopped winding? Why? The meeting is tonight. Tell Faithy all about Slovinsky, her pal. Faithy got coddled from life already too much.”

“Gittel, I said shut up!” said Mrs. Darwin. “Shut up!”

(Then to all concerned a short dear remembrance arrived. A policeman, thumping after him along the boardwalk, had arrested Mr. Darwin one Saturday afternoon. He had been distributing leaflets for the Sholem Aleichem School and disagreeing reasonably with his second cousin, who had a different opinion about the past and the future. The leaflet cried out in Yiddish: “Parents! A little child's voice calls to you, ‘Papa, Mama, what does it mean to be a Jew in the world today?' ” Mrs. Darwin watched them from the boardwalk bench, where she sat getting sun with a shopping bag full of leaflets. The policeman shouted furiously at Mr. and Mrs. Darwin and the old cousin, for they were in an illegal place. Then Faith's mother said to him in the Mayflower voice of a disappearing image of life, “Shut up, you Cossack!” “You see,” said Mr. Darwin, “to a Jew the word ‘shut up' is a terrible expression, a dirty word, like a sin, because in the beginning, if I remember correctly, was the word! It's a great assault. Get it?”)

“Celia, if you don't tell this story now, I roll right out and I don't roll in very soon. Life is life. Everybody today is coddlers.”

“Mama, I want to hear anything you know about Tess, anyway. Please tell me,” Faith asked. “If you don't tell me, I'll call up Hope. I bet you told her.”

“All stubborn people,” said Mrs. Darwin. “All right. Tess Slovinsky. You know about the first tragedy, Faith? The first tragedy was she had a child born a monster. A real monster. Nobody saw it. They put it in a home. All right. Then the second child. They went right away ahead immediately and they tried and they had a second child. This one was born full of allergies. It had rashes from orange juice. It choked from milk. Its eyes swoll up from going to the country. All right. Then her husband, Arnold Lever, a very pleasant boy, got a cancer. They chopped off a finger. It got worse. They chopped off a hand. It didn't help. Faithy, that was the end of a lovely boy. That's the letter I got this morning just before you came.”