Three-Martini Lunch (16 page)

24

I
began to put a plan of action together. For my idea to work, I would have to iron out certain wrinkles. My Social Security card, for one. During my first week at Torchon & Lyle, Miss Everett had sent me on my lunch hour to get mine. (It had taken several hours of waiting in line to obtain it, in fact, and when I got back to the office, Mr. Turner was so irate over my absence he nearly fired me on the spot; another subtle hint that perhaps Miss Everett had meant for me to lose my job right from the start.) I would need a new one now, in a different name. A driver's license and birth certificate wouldn't hurt, either. I asked around the Village, and finally a sculptor with whom I'd become acquainted told me of a small husband-and-wife operation somewhere on the Lower East Side that could produce the articles in question.

“Couple of old Poles,” he said. “Nice enough. Professional. Discreet. Got real good at filing documents back in the Old Country and ran a regular printing press during the war.” He handed me a card with the name of a Judaica shop printed in raised gold lettering. I flinched when I saw the
name of the shop and what they sold, instantly worried. I wondered what they would think of my proposed name change.

“So I just . . . walk into the shop and ask at the counter?”

He nodded. “
Discreetly
, of course. It'll cost you, though, and the price is not negotiable. No exceptions.”

“How much is it?” I asked. He took the card back and wrote down a sum on the other side. I looked at it; the figure was daunting, and I was living on my meager savings account by that point.

A fresh start would not be cheap, but after mulling things over for a few days, I decided it was worth it. I made the journey down to the Lower East Side, found the shop, and inquired at the counter. A hollow-cheeked woman with her hair drawn into a tight silver bun looked me over with cold, black, untrusting eyes and gave me a series of reluctant instructions. She frowned at the two names I'd written down—the old and the new—and raised an eyebrow, but didn't say anything. I wrote down the rest of the information she asked for, handed over my money, and was told to return in two weeks' time.

“Two weeks?” I asked.

“Yes,” she replied in an unfriendly, stoic voice. I couldn't help but notice she had a heavy Polish accent. “Is soonest we can have it ready.”

She frowned at me again and I worried that my impatience was all too obvious; two weeks seemed like an awfully long time to wait.

In the meantime, my girlfriend Diana came from Indiana to visit. I must've started to transform into quite the bohemian, because when she stepped off the bus at Port Authority she took one look at me and suddenly I saw it all there in the gaze of her surprised eyes: my sleek little haircut and my tidy black Capri pants slung loosely on my hips and the dark sophistication of the pair of sunglasses I'd fished out from the lost-and-found bin at the library. I'd been self-conscious about being fired and had told no one from home and thus was dreading my friend's visit because it meant facing facts about my having come to New York only to
fail. But as Diana made her way down the steps of the bus I knew I needn't have worried. Before stepping off the last stair she paused and stood there looking at me, taking it all in. All she could manage to say was “Oh . . . but you've gotten so slim!”

I laughed and she laughed and as her eyes traveled from my head to my toes I understood she was noticing all the differences. Diana had always been very fashionable by Indiana standards and I saw she was wearing a traveling suit that had very likely been ordered from the Sears, Roebuck catalog for the express purpose of this trip. Ordering from the Sears, Roebuck catalog was a popular way of picking out your wardrobe back in Fort Wayne and Diana had probably been pleased with the suit when it had arrived in the mail, but now I could see she was having a change of heart as she glimpsed her matronly silhouette reflected back to her in the giant black lenses of my sunglasses. She wasn't envious of me, for she looked equally unsure of my own gamine shape. This was before women regularly wore trousers outside of the house and here I was wearing them in the middle of Manhattan. I don't think she so much admired me as I had knocked her off-balance. She was recognizing a change, indirectly registering a difference between the provincial and the cosmopolitan.

We spent the weekend taking in all the sights. It made me feel funny to be with Diana, as though I were in two places at once. I remember quite clearly there was one point when we were walking along a sidewalk on the Upper East Side and we passed by a bar that, coincidentally enough, flew the cream and crimson flag of the Hoosiers on a little flagstaff over the door.

“Say,” Diana pointed. “Would you look at that!”

I laughed. “Didn't I tell you?” I said. “All of the nation—all of the
world
, actually—lives in New York. You can find everything here.”

Diana lingered in front of the bar, looking at the flag, and it dawned on me that no person is as poetically homesick as someone who has come to New York for the first time and glimpsed a small vestige of her home state.

“Wouldn't you like to go in there some night,” she said to me, “and meet a man from Indiana? Oh, wouldn't that be something? You'd be in stitches laughing together about the coincidence.”

I nodded, mostly to humor her.

“And then you could get married and move home,” Diana continued, breathless with the new, exciting plot she was hatching for my life, “and whenever you had people over for dinner you could tell them all about how you both moved a thousand miles away only to wind up meeting each other in a bar in New York.” She turned and studied my face for the appropriate level of enthusiasm.

I thought about all the interesting people I'd met in New York, especially the ones I'd met in the Village. Considered together, they certainly constituted a pack of oddballs. But even the strangest ones, even the ones who made me uncomfortable—like the female poet, for instance, who was locally famous for having adopted a habit of squatting down and urinating in the streets on her psychiatrist's advice that doing so would free her of kowtowing to this-or-that Freudian tendency—seemed like preferable dinner dates compared to the middle-class Midwestern folks who would attend this hypothetical soiree.

“Yes, that does sound nice,” I lied. We continued walking and spent the afternoon at the Metropolitan Museum, where Diana found the civilization of ancient Egypt only slightly less interesting than that of Bloomington, Indiana.

When I took Diana back to the bus station early Monday morning, she hugged me and then stepped back for a moment and regarded me with a sweet and sorrowful sigh. I understood then the sigh meant she was not coming back to the city and at the same time she was resigning herself to the fact that I had changed in a way that meant I was in New York to stay. We had been good girlfriends all through our school days and had even gone to the same college together, but now we would go our separate ways and that was just the way it was.

“Good-bye, Eden! Don't forget to write,” she said. “Promise you'll tell me the second you get engaged, and I'll do the same.”

Wanting to be pleasant, I agreed, but the truth was, I had little interest in this pact. As I waved good-bye to Diana that day at the bus station I figured I might as well also wave good-bye to things like pot roasts and French tulle wedding gowns and Sunday bridge games and all the other things I was sure would be in her future but not in mine. I imagined all the coffee-scented pecks on the cheek I would never receive as my husband brushed toast crumbs from the corners of his mouth and made his way out the front door in the mornings, and as I imagined these kisses I shivered, for I felt their presence pass over my skin in a tiny phantom parade. I didn't exactly envy Diana this life; nonetheless I felt a little mournful to think of things this way. It was a little like being at someone's funeral, and in a way I suppose I was mourning a version of myself that would never come to be.

I walked back from the bus station to the Barbizon. New York was having a hot summer that year and the afternoon sunshine poured over the city streets thick like amber honey and the pink faces of the people I passed gleamed with a sheen of sweat. I turned a corner and passed a pair of Hasidic men who looked particularly hot and uncomfortable under the weight of their heavy wool suits and black felt hats, the curls of their long
payot
sticking to their cheeks. Fort Wayne and the Midwest suddenly felt farther away than it ever had, and I didn't know who I was or how people saw me anymore; I was neither here nor there. I looked at my watch and calculated which towns Diana's bus might be passing through at the present moment.

In Central Park, I sat down on a bench. I gave myself permission to be desperately, hopelessly homesick as I counted off sixty seconds according to the second hand of my watch. Then I got up and forced myself to let it pass.

T
wo weeks had passed, which meant it was time to pick up my papers. It was the first thing I thought of, before I even opened my eyes that morning. I got up, got dressed, and decided to take the bus from the Barbizon down to the Lower East Side. It was a slow slog with a lot of stops, and took a very long time. I could've taken the subway, I suppose, but for some reason I was in the mood to stay aboveground, to look out the window as the scenery changed and really
see
it: the way one Manhattan neighborhood slides into the next, a hundred villages, each of a different character, all piled up on one island. Eventually the stone high-rises and brownstones of the East Sixties gave way to the colorful commercial awnings and more industrial buildings of the Thirties and Twenties and the brick tenements at the outskirts of the Village, until we had trundled all the way down to Houston Street, where the bus finally turned and continued east. We passed Katz's Delicatessen, and although I was no relation, I was well aware of the irony. Seeing that familiar name in bold vertical letters on the red-and-white sign sent a pang through my body.

The peculiar feeling stayed with me as I dismounted at the bus stop and made my way down Orchard Street, passing bakeries selling knishes, their signs in the windows written in both English and Yiddish. This was simultaneously exotic and familiar. My grandmother had made knishes, and both of my grandparents could understand Yiddish. To me they had spoken English, but to each other they spoke a mixture of German and Yiddish—until the war came, that is. Once the war came they dropped the German altogether and spoke only Yiddish in hushed tones, when strangers were not around. I tried to picture them here, skirting the murky puddles that perpetually lined the narrow, uneven streets of the Lower East Side, the two of them moving through the hustle and bustle, street vendors shouting prices after them. When they'd immigrated, they'd passed through New York, and then Chicago, but only briefly. To them America meant wide-open spaces, and they'd gone to Indiana in search of those spaces, settling on Fort Wayne because it was also the location of Indiana's oldest synagogue.

It was funny to have left the Midwest for New York only to have things turned against me. I thought of my parents back in Indiana now: working and shopping, joining the local Lions Club, volunteering for the Salvation Army. Both of them the American-born children of immigrants, they were much more intent on assimilation to Midwestern life than their parents, going about their daily business with an air of cheerful, determined obliviousness that only the very self-conscious possess. There were still little incidents, here and there. My parents' application to join the country club was refused. Someone scratched a Star of David into the paint of our old Hudson while my mother was inside shopping at the Kroger. There was a birthday party from which I'd been purposely excluded. I remember once going to synagogue and seeing freshly spattered egg yolks dripping down the outside wall. The war certainly ratcheted up the tension; I was aware there were certain families in town that felt the war was “our fault.” But despite all these memories, my parents did a proficient job of shielding
me from anything more than this, keeping these incidents far out on the periphery of my childhood, and I very much felt Indiana was my home. They'd found a way to be “the Katzes” of Fort Wayne, Indiana, and so it was with a sense of shame now that I had failed to make it as Eden Katz in New York City. Had they known what I was about to do, I believe it would've broken their hearts.

It was a different thing to be Jewish in New York than it was in Indiana. You would think it would be easier, but that was exactly the assumption that had landed me in trouble in the first place. It was only easier in a different way. It's a myth that people who live in cities are naturally more open-minded, more accepting and tolerant of difference. The truth is, whatever people are, be it saints or bigots, they simply are these things, and the city—by smashing all those different kinds of people up against one another—just makes people's tolerance (or lack of it) all that much more pronounced. Unlike me, Miss Everett had known the secret of this, and how to capitalize on it. I felt I only had two choices: Go home with my tail between my legs, or stay by any means necessary and fight.

The shop was dark and cool on the inside, if a little musty. I stood there a moment listening to the quiet. On the far side of the cramped little space a man called to me from behind the counter.

“Hello,” he said. He had a heavy Polish accent and was mostly bald, with a mottled map of liver spots gathering where his hairline used to be. I looked around for the woman I had spoken to before, but she was nowhere to be found. “Can I help you with something?”

“I . . . was here two weeks ago,” I said.

“Ah.” He held up a finger in the air. “I thought it might be you,” he said. He turned to pull back a heavy navy curtain that led to some kind of back room.

“I spoke to a woman last time . . .” I continued, anxious to establish that he and I indeed understood each other. “She took my information, but she didn't say much. She seemed a bit cross . . . I was afraid I had
offended her,” I said, trying to move towards him through the space and nearly knocking over a basket filled with stacks of dark velvet yarmulkes.

“That was my wife, Agata,” he said, grinning and waving a dismissive hand. “She is never smiling. Nothing personal.” He gestured for me to follow him behind the curtain to the back room. “I know what you are here for. Come, come!”

I followed. The thick, chalky smell of dust filled the air. My eyes worked to adjust to the darkness.

“You can call me Leo,” he said once we were behind the curtain. I nodded. We were in a storage room of some variety. It was no doubt the place where Leo and Agata took breaks from minding the shop. There was a table with a plate of half-eaten food, what appeared to be chicken and orange peels, and a soap opera squawked from the speakers of a large wooden radio sitting on a shelf. On the wall was a curiously antique-looking painting in dark, heavy colors. I squinted and realized I was looking at the Virgin Mary. On an adjacent wall was another surprising object: a giant baroque silver cross, slightly dull with tarnish.

He saw me frowning at the cross in confusion and chuckled.

“We're Catholics,” he said.

“But . . .” I tried to work this out. “You own a Judaica shop,” I said.

“Business is business.” He shrugged. He walked over to a heavy oak desk, opened a drawer, and held up a tall envelope. I understood on instinct that inside it were all the documents I'd requested. “Before the war, we ran a little rare-books shop. Quiet place. Too quiet! There was an antique printing press in the back,” he said. “Then the war came. That press was the real business. Everyone wanting papers! We got hundreds of people out of Nazi territory . . . for a price, of course.”

“And you came to America and opened a Judaica shop?”

He shrugged again. “Why not? We already had the stock. You see, some people were grateful. Grateful for their lives! Others . . . left us
things to hide and never came back. Beautiful things!” he said, and opened a drawer full of ornate silver kiddush cups and gilded menorahs, waving a hand. “Was dangerous to hide them! And now . . . now, why should they go to waste? They are part of a great tradition. Gold! Silver! Beautiful things! Someone will be proud to own such beautiful things.”

“For a price,”
I said.

He narrowed his eyes at me. “For a price, yes. But is things used for old traditions and very useful to new people. Is good for making important memories all the same.” He opened the tall envelope and slid the documents out onto the desk. Lifting what appeared to be a Social Security card high into the air—I presumed it was the one I had requested—he said, “Sometimes is important to remember a culture, sometimes is important to forget it, eh? Reminds me of the old days.”

“Is that what I ordered?” I asked in a cold voice. I reached out a hand as though to offer to take it. He held it away, hesitating.

“I don't understand. This is
America
, is fine for you here! Okay, not perfect, but is fine!”

“It's for a job. I want to apply for a new job.”

“What kind of job?”

“In publishing.”

“Hah!” he laughed and bent over to slap his knee. “In
publishing
? Is lots of Jews in publishing! Tons! You are looking in wrong places. I take your money, but you don't need new name. Is madness.”

“I need a new start,” I said, angry at what he was implying. “It's not that I hate my name. There's someone who . . . Well, anyway, the point is I want to start over.”

He narrowed his eyes and looked me over from head to toe. “My wife say she think something funny about you. She didn't understand you—a nice girl!—what you are up to.”

“I haven't done anything illegal, if that's what you mean,” I snapped.
Leo raised his hands over his head as if to say
Don't shoot the messenger
. “I mean,” I added more meekly, wilting with the realization, “except for . . . well, this.”

“What do I care about your business? Your business is your business.” He dropped his hands and brought the long envelope over to me. “
My
business is papers.”

“Thank you,” I said, taking them. I opened the envelope and inspected the various documents. It contained everything I needed to start over again, to apply for jobs in a new name and have a fresh beginning. I thanked him again and turned to leave. Before I was out the door, however, he said something that echoed in my mind during the whole ride home.

“Congratulations,” Leo said. “You are now what we in the business call a ghost.”

I looked at him, considering what to say. But then I thought to myself,
Ghosts have no words.
So I said nothing, turned, and left.

That night, as I went to sleep feeling a fresh wave of victory and rebellion against Miss Everett, I couldn't quite decide how to feel about Leo and Agata, whether I regarded them as merciful or mercenary. That was the thing about people: Most are a combination of the two, with variously good and bad results.