“No, I will. Her mother presents heart disease and the girl rheumatic fever. I feel terrible that I stuck them up here.”
“Except for the steps it wasn’t a mistake. It’s quiet, isolated. No one will bother her if she takes a nap every day. I’ll bring her some lunch.”
“I’ll pick out a book for her. She laughed in my face when I suggested the Bobbsey Twins.”
“And what did she recommend,
The Collected Papers of Sigmund
Freud
?”
“Don’t underestimate her. But the family doesn’t like our food. The grandmother is a professional chef, European. I guess they like European cooking. The mother, Lil, is the singer. Talented but not maternal.”
“And the father?”
“Quick-witted. But the uncle is a pompous ass.”
They closed the door. At the moment I didn’t know who I loved more, Dr. Scott Wolfson or Hal Pankin. I didn’t bother about his girlfriend, Sybil; it no longer mattered what I watched last night, it had nothing to do with me. I fell asleep again.
Possibly an hour later, Margie touched my shoulder. Her face was flushed from galloping up the stairs. Her cotton dress clung to her, and there were small islands of sweat under her armpits and across her bosom. “Dr. Hal says for you to try to eat.”
The tray held half of a tuna sandwich and a carton of milk with a straw. Just like the dreck at The Grand Canal Cafeteria.
I didn’t venture downstairs for the rest of the afternoon, but my parents and Willy came up at about four o’clock. This turned into my favorite time, all of us together in the big bed, my parents gossiping, relating what each had said and done with the other guests.
Lil had enjoyed talking to Estelle Solomon-Sullivan. Her husband, the hotshot lawyer, didn’t come up on weekends—too crowded, too unrestful. “And do you know what, Jack,” Lil explained, “on Sunday, he takes the train to New York and he goes to see a matinee, a play, like you. He prefers Sunday afternoon in New York in the summer. Mr. Sullivan, Philip, he loves the air-conditioned theaters or he sees the latest movie. And I said, ‘That’s what my husband does when he doesn’t come up for a visit.’ And Estelle said, ‘I’m glad we have so much in common.’
“I said, ‘My husband loves Talullah Bankhead,’ and she answered, ‘So does mine, he thinks she is fabulous. He loves her voice. But it’s hard to catch her in the summer. She’s usually on vacation herself.’ And one more thing. Estelle’s thinking of going back to teaching. She did that a long time ago. With a grown son who’s going to be a doctor she wants to do something with herself.” Lil took a deep breath, “Estelle said, ‘meaningful.’ She wants to do something meaningful. You would think that with a rich husband and a son who’s away studying, she would take it easy, but no, she needs meaningful.”
“I wonder why she didn’t have more children.”
“They tried. They couldn’t.”
As always, my father boasted, “I could make ten children in my sleep.”
We laughed. My father’s old jokes, his old quips found a welcome audience with us.
I waited a moment before asking, “Did you meet Hal’s girlfriend?”
“Shiksa type,” my mother said dismissively. That meant no makeup and hair that wasn’t waved at the beauty parlor.
Below us we could hear the scraping of furniture on the wooden floors. Jack frowned. “What’s the racket?”
“It’s for the day people,” I explained. “That’s what Hal calls them. They drive up for the fried chicken on Saturday night. Then they take a walk or sit around and drive home. Hal told me.”
“I hope they don’t serve butter with the chicken.”
“Mother! At breakfast you asked Margie if the chickens were kosher. Last night you worried about butter and fish.”
“The girl is right,” said my father. “What are you, some kind of mockie? You’re American-born, seen the best plays in New York, interviewed at Saks Fifth. One day in Connecticut, and you’re acting like a rabbi’s wife.”
My mother bit her lip, fussed with her hair. “I don’t know. Everything is different here.”
“How different?”
“The women. One goes to law school, one wants to do something meaningful.”
“If you mean they’re not like your dumb bimbo friend Ada, you’ve got that right.”
“Jack, just because of what Ada did when she was fourteen, living with a boy from the streets, doesn’t make her a bimbo.”
“You shouldn’t be mingling with such a low element. The women here, they’re like the women you wait on at Palace Fashions. How about Aunt Bertha with her Lilly Daché hats? You fit right in with her.”
“Aunt Bertha knows about us. We don’t have to put on an act.”
“You worry about an act? First off, you’re a businesswoman. Second, you could be on Broadway right now if you wanted to.”
“In the afternoon they read books, they talk about books.” Worry glazed my mother’s green eyes. “Connecticut, it’s not like Atlantic City.”
“Atlantic City is full of New Yorkers, that’s why you liked it. But if you’re not happy, we’ll pack up and go home.”
Terrified that we would leave, I cried out, “Everyone loves you. Hal told me you were very talented and asked if you sang on the stage.”
“He said that? He meant that?”
My father delivered the punch line. “Lil, you’re a knockout. Just remember what your favorite, Mayor Jimmy Walker said, ‘No woman was ever seduced by a book.’ Forget about those books. Just be yourself.”
That night I learned that the acceptance or rejection of food has nothing to do with the meal itself but with the memories that surround it. Never having been anywhere near fried chicken, we heard little else during the day except that a Negro woman from the South who lived in Colchester started to prepare it right after lunch. For the dinner, which attracted dozens of visitors, the med students spruced up with white shirts and black pants. They carried out steaming platters of plump golden chicken with a crunchy skin we could sink our teeth into, along with two sugar holders filled with golden honey to be poured over the chicken. A golden dinner: chicken, honey, corn, cornbread.
My mother behaved herself, didn’t ask what the chicken had been fried in, ignored the butter, was silenced by the wonder of the meal, the best we had since our arrival. Like everyone else, we tucked our napkins under our chins. People made humming sounds as they ate, not concealing their appetites. For us, each dish was new, remarkable, impossible to forget.
When we thought we could eat no more, Hal and Gabe rolled in the dessert carts, dozens of blueberry pies with lattice crusts over freshly picked berries, our initial taste of true American pie with an American crust. For years afterward my grandmother tried to duplicate these pies, and didn’t succeed. She could perform wonders with yeast, but American flaky crust, not the commercial junk at The Grand Canal, eluded her. Two pies for our table, ice cream optional. Not to be singled out as lacking in American savvy, my mother did not refuse the vanilla ice cream. From that moment on the triumph over ancient dietary laws stayed with her. It would become part of our family’s legend, my mother eating blueberry pie with ice cream after chicken.
Dinner over, the road outside the hotel was thronged with guests strolling back and forth, walking off their dinner. The grounds were filled with day people. Those too full to walk fell into the lawn chairs.
Standing on the porch watching the Saturday night spectacle, I felt a tap on my shoulder and a young woman said, “I’m Sybil. Let’s talk.” She led me to the back of the house, though she had no intention of sitting on the veranda. Instead she lifted two rocking chairs to the ground, to a shaded spot, hidden by a tree. Sybil was slim and muscular and she wore what my father called an ice cream suit, a long white skirt and a short-sleeved white jacket. Her hair, and best feature, was a tangled mass of chestnut brown, and she had lively, inquisitive eyes that darted everywhere, not missing a detail.
“So,” she began, “how do you like it here?”
“I love it. I wish I could live in Colchester the whole year.”
“But aren’t you from New York? Don’t you miss it?”
“I hate New York. My parents and grandmother love it. My mother and father, they love the plays, the movies, the musicals. New Yorkers born and bred. That’s what my father says.”
“Do they ever take you with them to plays?”
“Of course. On Wednesday or Friday, their days off, sometimes they take me with them. And my grandmother and I go to the Yiddish Theater on Second Avenue.”
“That’s very cosmopolitan, seeing plays in two languages. What do you like the best, comedies or dramas?”
“There’s one play in Yiddish about this king with three daughters and he loses his kingdom and two girls are very mean to him, but the third one, well he loves her best, but she dies and then he dies of a broken heart.”
“
King Lear
. You see
King Lear
in Yiddish?”
Sybil’s arms, slim and suntanned against her white cropped jacket, marked her as “uptown.” Her body and face were tense. She went on: “Then why don’t you like New York? I would love to live there instead of Cambridge.”
“Because it’s cold, and I hate the streets in the winter and I can’t stand the subway and the crowds.”
“Don’t you think it would be cold if you lived in Colchester in the winter?”
“Yes, there would be snow, but no slush, no icicles on the windows.” I stopped myself. I talked too much.
“You’re a funny duck.”
“That’s what Hal says.”
“He told me to speak to you. Said you were nine going on nineteen or maybe ninety.”
She began to rock her chair. Her slim fingers clutched the clawlike ends of the chair arms.
“What’s your favorite thing to do?” she asked.
“Read.”
“Don’t you like to swim or play tennis or ride a bike or skate?”
Sybil came from Dr. Scott Wolfson’s world with her tennis and swimming.
“Not much,” I said neutrally.
“What does your mother think about your reading?”
“She’s not too happy about it.” For once my fear of betraying my mother evaporated. “When I stayed home because of rheumatic fever, she went to the library for me and picked the same book I just returned.”
“Why does it bother her?”
I waited to answer. “Did you meet my cousin Alice? She likes girls like that. My cousin Alice, she’s a very good dancer. And Shirley Levine, she wears socks no matter how cold it is in the winter and she’s a great skater.”
Sybil started to laugh, slowly, then harder. She rocked her chair faster.
“I hate Saturdays at the farm.” I heard bitterness in her voice. “Hal won’t be done for hours. And we have so little time together.”
“It will be quiet when the day visitors leave. My father and uncle drive home tomorrow.”
She stopped rocking. “I won’t be here tomorrow. I’m leaving at midnight to meet my parents. I promised I’d drive with them to the Cape. You’d like the Vineyard. Everyone reads and swims and there are lots of girls like you, all in shorts, riding bicycles.
“Of course I promised my parents, but if Hal agreed to travel with me to Europe these next two weeks of vacation, my parents would understand. I begged him last night, I begged him. This may be our last chance because of the political situation in Europe. I wanted to see Venice or Florence, just for a short while, and on the boat we could have a honeymoon, but no, he’s tied to this farm, to this awful place. Sometimes I think that when he finishes med school he’ll come back and practice here.”
The encroaching dark provided a cover for my recent fantasy. “Are you going to marry Hal?”
She gained joy from her mockery. “Aren’t you the bourgeois?” she said.
My father said that word often, but with a different pronunciation and a different meaning: dumb or stupid or silly. “That’s a lot of bushwah,” he’d say.
Sybil’s tone cut hard, implying uptown against downtown, my origins.
Perhaps she realized my confusion because she added, “Hal has to finish med school, his internship, his residency, more work for his specialty or research. These types of men are familiar to me. My father is one of them. An oceanographer. He’d stay in Woods Hole forever if my mother didn’t complain. But I’m the restless type. I’d like to quit school and travel to Europe before it explodes. Or sail to Alaska or Easter Island. I love Hal but his idea of our future is too confining. My family and I went to Europe every other year in the summer. My father gave lectures there. We loved Austria. But now my father is afraid because of the Nazis. Hal isn’t afraid. He just loves the farm too much. But wait until you meet Maurey. You’ll fall in love with him. Everyone does.”
I sat without moving. Sybil had forgotten me, rocking, rocking. Finally, as the darkness increased, she said, “Good-bye,” and disappeared. I never saw her again. Neither did Hal after that night.
We didn’t bother with breakfast the following morning. My parents enjoyed sleeping late at home and early rising on their vacation made no sense. Besides, we had consumed twice what we normally ate the night before and food didn’t tempt us. While my parents slept Willy and I played Casino and then twenty-one.
For once Aunt Bea didn’t come knocking at our door to boss us around. With our parents asleep in the big bed we felt a sense of intimate security. When we tired of playing cards Willy whistled softly, “I Can’t Give You Anything But Love,” followed by “Tea for Two.” I wrote about yesterday’s events in my notebook.
It wasn’t until noon that we sauntered downstairs and bumped into Hal. If an emotional scene had passed between him and Sybil, he showed no sign of it. “I’ve been looking for you,” he said, laughing. “The Simons left for the lake, but Ron can run you down there if you’re interested.”
Because of my parents’ aversion to water, especially my mother’s fear that she would have a heart attack if she moved past the shoreline, we avoided bodies of water from the Atlantic to swimming holes. Uncle Geoff, an accomplished swimmer, liked nothing more than to show off his skills, which he learned in front of open fire hydrants and later in public pools where he could take out his aggressions by whacking other boys on their heads to ensure space for himself. I think we were happy to be rid of the Simons for a few hours. Lil, adorned in shorts and a halter-top created by sewing together two red bandannas, devoted herself to her tan, lying on a chaise. Jack kibitzed with one of the men about the 1929 stock market crash.