Til the Real Thing Comes Along (21 page)

“Lil,” he said, wanting at once to hold and kiss and protect her, but also to tell her to be damned because she’d caused him
so much pain. “What is it?”

“Oh, Mal, thank heaven I can come home now,” she said, looking at him with swollen red eyes. “You see, I left because I was
so afraid… that you’d stay with me, be saddled with me… a woman who could never have… but it’s different now. Now I can come
home because I’m… Mal, I’m pregnant,” she said, holding him at arm’s length, praying she would look into his face and see
that he understood. That he’d know she had left only because it had been the best choice. That now she could go back home
to Hancock Park. And he did seem to understand everything now. She could see him putting it all together as he looked at her.
Now he would make it okay. Or not. Instead his eyes looked cloudy. His face impassive. His jaw steel.

“I’m sorry, Lily,” he said, “but I don’t know what to tell. It bothers me that you’re a leaver, a quitter, a person who runs
away from a problem when it gets to be too big. That doesn’t give me a lot of confidence in our continued future. I know that
your being pregnant is what you wanted. It’s what I wanted, too, but this episode showed me a side of you I’m afraid of, because
bigger issues than this one may surface, and then… where are you? I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t think we can work it out.
I have to leave for Chicago now—I have a meeting there this evening and another tomorrow—and then I’ll be back and we’ll have
to decide what to do about the baby.”

Lily was shaking and queasy. The doctor had told her to cancel her meeting this afternoon at the studio and stay in bed, for
her sake as well as for the sake of the baby. The baby. Mal’s baby. She’d waited for this moment all her life, and now he…

“Mal,” she said, “I left because I thought maybe you would be better off if I…” But he had turned and was walking toward the
plane. So she retreated to her car, turned the key, and drove off the field.

From the window of
The Lily,
Mal watched her as she drove away. He waited until her car was completely out of view before he called the tower.

“Meeting canceled,” Colleen said. “Postponed, I should say. Raymond’s secretary called here and said they can’t do it until
next Friday. I figured that was okay with you ’cause once you told Rand that you were pregnant he’d…”

There was something about the look on Lily’s face that made Colleen stop talking.

“He won’t take me back,” Lily said.

“Of course he will,” Colleen said.

“No. I did a wrong thing. A bad thing by leaving when the going was rough. He never would have done that. It’s just that I
thought I was doing right, Mother, and I…”

Colleen Daniels held her daughter while she cried, the way she had when her daughter had shed all her adolescent tears. Only
this time Lily was crying very grown-up tears.

What in God’s name was she going to do? She was pregnant at last, and Mal would have none of it. She would have the baby.
Maybe the pregnancy wouldn’t show and she could make a movie or two; then she’d take a few months off. Just a few months that
Julian Raymond could add on to the end of the seven years, and she and Colleen would raise the baby and…

“Maybe I ought to send one of your brothers over to Hancock Park to pick up some of your things,” Colleen Daniels said.

“No,” Lily said. “I’ll go. The servants are off today, and Mal’s gone to Chicago. I won’t have to see anyone. It’ll be all
right.” She felt awful. Queasy. Desperately sad. She wouldn’t be all right going there alone. To the house she’d lived in
with Mal. Their room, their bed. But she steeled herself and made the drive to Hancock Park, alone.

The big house was silent as she opened the door into the foyer. Her feet tapped along the wood floor as she walked to the
stairway, but before she went up even one step, she turned to look around the house. The portrait Mal had commissioned of
her, which was hanging above the living room fireplace, caught her eye.

“I need to look at it when you’re far away from me,”
he had said, by way of explaining why he had to have a portrait of her, then added, “like when I’m in the living room and
you’re in the kitchen.” They’d both laughed. For six years the kitchen was as far away from him as she’d allowed herself to
be. Until now. Mal.

Steel-jawed and stubborn. She knew he behaved that way in countless business deals. Relentless, unyielding to emotion or need.
But where she was concerned he’d let that posture go. More and more. Until she breeched a rule she knew she shouldn’t have.
A rule he was right about. Staying in and fighting to the end was what he always did. What winners did.

In her closet she stood and stared at her clothes. Each dress, suit, blouse, brought back a memory of the occasion on which
she’d worn it. Inaugural ball, political fund-raiser, that night in Bermuda when the stars glittered on the waves and they’d
walked on the beach so in love. She couldn’t touch anything. Just stood there for ages. Then she sighed and walked back into
the bedroom and gasped when she saw a man’s shadow in the hallway. And then the man.

“Mal.”

He extended his arms to her, then took her into them and held her, thank you, dear God, held her and kissed her hair and her
face and her tears.

“Mal,” was all she could say. Her joy was shaking her. Finally he moved her to aim’s length and looked seriously into her
eyes.

“Don’t ever leave me again,” he said.

“Oh, I won’t,” she said. “I promise, my love. I never will. Never. Ever. Ever.”

It was a promise that would be broken in a very few years.

1956

B
ubbe died on Pesach, and the rabbi said at the funeral that people who died on holidays were the most blessed. Rosie Jane
looked into the open coffin and was sure that Bubbe was only playing a trick on all of them and that any minute she would
sit up and start singing
“Oyfn Pripitchuk”
the way she did when die sat up in bed every morning, before she put her teeth in. Of course you had to already know it was
“Oyfn Pripitchuk”
she was singing, because when she sang it without her teeth, even an expert couldn’t make out the words. But today there
was no singing.

Long after they closed the coffin and carried it out of the tiny chapel to the cemetery, Rosie didn’t stop praying that Bubbe
would give a big knock. Like the knock she gave on the bathroom door the day she turned the doorknob too hard and the long
part fell out into the hallway and the short part fell into her hand and no one was home. So, finding herself trapped inside
the bathroom, Bubbe, who was not one to waste time, took a very long bubble bath. Then she tried on all of Rosie’s mother’s
makeup, which was in the upper right-hand drawer next to the sink. And at three-thirty, when she heard Rosie come in from
school, gave such a knock that Rosie came flying down the hall to let her out. And they both laughed until they cried at how
silly Bubbe’s ninety-two-year-old face looked wearing mascara and lipstick and a penciled beauty mark on her chin. Today,
there wasn’t one little knock to be heard.

The Russian cemetery on Fort Pitt Boulevard echoed with the sad voices of Aunt Sasha and Uncle Benny, Uncle Gershon and Aunt
Malke, rich Uncle Shulke and even Aunt Chana, who hadn’t spoken to Bubbe in two years since the fight they had over which
of them knew the best way to cook chicken for Uncle Munish, who of course was also there. All of them were mourning the loss
of Bubbe, their sweet mother, who, in order to support herself and her nine children and to be able to afford the passage
to America for all of them, had built a still in the floor of the family house in a
shtetl
near Kiev, and made moonshine whiskey that she sold to the goyim. “Chaike Kaminsky,” the rabbi said now, and his big quivering
voice sounded to Rosie like an announcer on a radio show when he’d said the part about how she was “a beloved mother and grandmother,”
and now again as he recited the prayer for the dead,
“Yiskadal v’yis Kadosh.
…” And every one of the aunts and uncles and cousins nodded and tapped one another on the arm to point out that little Rosie,
Bubbe’s youngest grandchild, Rifke and Louie’s girl, was crying the hardest of all.

Ay, ay, ay. Such devotion, they all thought. It must be because Rosie loved her Bubbele so much. After all, Bubbe had been
sharing Rosie’s teensy bedroom in Rifke and Louie’s apartment, upstairs from Shulke’s grocery store, since Rosie was born.
So who could be closer? And everyone knew that while Rifke was so busy running the grocery store and Louie was so busy working
at the Settlement House that it was Bubbe who raised Rosie. That must be why the poor little
meydele
wept so bitterly. Wasn’t it? How could any of them suspect that what was making Rosie cry was not just grief but guilt and
terrible remorse over something she could never tell the others. That
she
had killed Bubbe.

Bubbe was eighty years old when Rosie was born. And the reason the old woman had moved out of Unde Shulke’s fancy-shmancy
house in Squirrel Hill, and in with the “poor relations” who lived upstairs from the grocery store, was because one morning
her smiling bubbling dentures in the glass on the bathroom sink had scared Shulke’s skinny little son Barry, who had to go
to see a psychiatrist because of it. And Bubbe refused to apologize to Barry and refused to say she’d never do it again.

Well some things are
“bashert,
” as Bubbe liked to say, which means they are meant to be, because for Rifke and
Louie, who had no children and who both worked like dogs, it was perfect to have Bubbe around. It gave them pleasure to find
her waiting there with a nice piece of cooked brisket or a boiled chicken when they came from work at night. And more important
was that Bubbe had been there only a month when Rifke found out, after years of being unable to conceive, that thank God she
was pregnant. That’s when it was decided by Uncle Shulke, who decided everything about everything in the family, that while
Rifke continued to work in his store, not only would Bubbe take care of the cooking but the new baby also.

Everyone in the family said later that the responsibility of having to take care of Rosie gave Bubbe twelve more years of
life. In fact, Bubbe had so much zeal and energy, and such a sense of fun, that she became not only the little girl’s caretaker
but her best friend as well. And why would a girl need anyone else? Bubbe played jacks and ball better than any kid on the
street. Her wrinkled hands somehow knew exactly how high to throw the little rust-colored ball so she could magically scoop
up the jacks as she counted them off in Yiddish.
“Eynts, tsvei, dray, fir
…” Bubbe never spoke English. She didn’t have to. Everyone in her family spoke Yiddish as well as English and she didn’t speak
to anyone who wasn’t in her family. Why should she? She had nine children, they had nine spouses, and there were twenty-two
grandchildren. That was enough people for anyone to have to speak to.

Bubbe knew fabulous card games, even though she didn’t know the names of the cards. For example, she always called the king
the tsar, and the queen the tsarina, and the jack Yossl. And she taught all the games to Rosie. By the time she was five,
Rosie could shuffle like a riverboat gambler. But the best thing about Bubbe was the way she always managed to dig up some
money to take Rosie to what had become their mutually favorite place, which Bubbe tried to say in English, since she had no
idea what the Yiddish words for it could be, or even if there were Yiddish words to describe the “moon pitchkes.”

Bubbe would stare at the big screen, watching the actors and not understanding a word they said, and then, afterward, as she
and Rosie walked home from the Manor Theater, Rosie would explain to her in Yiddish the “moon pitchke” they had just seen.
And Bubbe would laugh at the
jokes in all the right places and cry at the sad parts when Rosie told it, just the way the audience had laughed and cried
at the actual movie in the theater. Except when they saw
Woman on the Run,
and Lily Daniels, who played the part of Red, rushed into the street where her gangster boyfriend Gino lay, full of bullets.
“I love you more than anything,” she said. “And now it looks as if you’re going to leave me.” For that one, Bubbe cried in
the movie theater with everybody else, because what Lily Daniels was saying was in her big green eyes and it needed no translation.
Rosie and Bubbe went to the Manor Theater every time there was a new movie to see. But that was their only luxury. Everything
else they treated themselves to was free.

They went regularly to the Carnegie Museum to see the dinosaur bones, about which Bubbe told Rosie that if she could take
those bones home and get the rabbi to kosher them, she could make a great soup. They went to Schenley Park to ride the swings,
on which Bubbe pumped higher than any of the children. And when she flew back and forth through the air, her long skirt catching
the wind, her dark-stockinged legs flying out and then in, her crocheted shawl floating behind her, she looked like a Halloween
witch, and she screamed with laughter like one too.

Who could kill such a Bubbe? Well it wasn’t because Rosie didn’t love her. In fact, in many ways Rosie seemed to model herself
after the old woman. For example, when Rosie carried her books to school she always carried them in a shopping bag. When she
packed a lunch for herself it usually consisted of a piece of herring and an end slice of black bread. When the kids in school
were asked to name their favorite entertainers seen on television, and most of the other kids picked the Video Ranger or Buffalo
Bob Smith, Rosie picked Menasha Skulnik.

Rosie knew she was different from the other kids, and for a long time she didn’t care. She would come home from school and
do her homework and then put poppy seeds into the hamantashen dough Bubbe had rolled out, or hold a skein of wool while Bubbe
wound it into a ball.