4

Men I

I’M AS TALL AS my mother’s waist, walking in open spaces between her and My Rae—Hollenbeck Park, the Moroccan desert (but no Gary Cooper is in sight). Where we are doesn’t matter because we’re together.

“Balance me!” I demand. They know the game and comply. Mommy on the right, My Rae on the left, every few steps their warm, upturned hands bear my forty pounds, and I swing my legs in the air. This is more delicious than a bottle of warm milk.

A pea green puddle pops into our path out of nowhere, and we pause to contemplate its mystery. We can’t go straight ahead so we’ll go around. “But we have to put you down,” Mommy and My Rae say in one voice.

My feet hit the ground, and a snake pops out of the water. It is beautifully mottled, smiling as in a cartoon. I don’t know whether to laugh or be scared. I blink, and my eyes open just in time to see My Rae dragged under the opaque water.

Again the snake pops up, ringed with power. I ready my mouth to scream, but before breath reaches my vocal cords, the snake arches, slashes like a whip, and my mother is gone.

In the daylight I knew it was only a dream, but for weeks the images came back so clearly that my stomach would contract to my spine. I felt bereft of something I had no power to keep for myself, though it was vital to me.

 

I did nothing about Chuck, but sometimes I wished he would be the one to say it was over. Yet if he did, wouldn’t it be awful to be rejected? Every time I thought I’d tell him that I couldn’t see him anymore, another reason not to say it would pop into my head: What if I broke up with him and then I never found another person to love me, just like my mother never found anyone after Moishe? What if I really did love him now—like Rae once said I’d love a boy—but I didn’t know it because all I’d ever seen of that sort of love was the crazy lose-your-head-and-ruin-your-life way my mother did it? I just couldn’t figure out what was true or what to do. So I drifted.

A few weeks before the end of the year, Chuck told me over sodas that he’d made reservations for New Year’s Eve at the Sinaloa Club. I knew exactly where it was—just a few doors away from the delicatessen on Brooklyn Avenue where my mother and I went to eat. Sometimes I’d see men with black jackets and ladies with beautiful long gowns step from sleek cars in front of the Sinaloa Club. When the men held the padded pink door open for their dates, the street would be filled with a woman’s sultry voice belting songs that always rhymed amor with dolor. Though I never got a look inside, I was sure that the Sinaloa Club was the closest thing in East L.A. to what I’d seen in movie magazines of Hollywood nightspots like Ciro’s or the Mocambo, where the stars met to sip martinis and be sophisticated. “I’m rentin’ a tux and steppin’ out wid ma baby,” Chuck sang now in the empty soda shop and got up to do a goofy jig and a Charlie Chaplin bow in front of me. I could wear my pink satin Mistress of Ceremonies gown and the silver stiletto heels that Eddy had given me.

But what would my mother do on New Year’s Eve if I went out with Chuck? Always, since we’d come to Los Angeles, we’d spent the last hours of the year drinking hot chocolate and listening to the radio—“Your Hit Parade” and then the midnight countdown at Times Square.

I never really decided what to do, but when the sun went down on the last day of 1954, I found myself taking a bath and then standing at the mirror putting on rouge and eye shadow from little plastic boxes, remembering how I’d watched my mother in the mirror those Saturday nights in New York as she applied her makeshift cosmetics. How beautiful she’d been.

I took my pink gown down from the hook behind our bedroom door.

“You didn’t tell me you had a show tonight,” my mother said. She stood behind me while I examined a little tear in the gown’s netting.

“I’ve got a date.” I turned to face her. I hadn’t said anything about it earlier because I didn’t know myself what I was going to do. I’d never even said I had a boyfriend. Stupid! I should have told her I’d been invited to the Frombergs’ party. I should have arranged to meet Chuck down the block. Now it was too late to say anything but the truth. It all came out—where I met him, that he was Italian, his age, his truck—and with every word I said she looked more upset.

“You’re fourteen years old!” my mother yelled.

She’d never yelled at me in anger before.

“So what?” So what if I was fourteen? She’d never treated me like a child. I’d always been an adult.

She stomped from the room, and seconds later I heard her screaming into the telephone, “You know what she’s doing?”

It didn’t take twenty minutes. From the rip in the window shade I could see the black car pulling up in front of our house and Rae, in a little maroon hat, rushing out, then bending back in to wave a worried Mr. Bergman off, as if she didn’t want him to witness this.

I returned to what I was doing, but now I was mad. I dusted talcum powder on my armpits in huge puffs, I pulled old socks and new movie magazines from under my bed and tossed them over my shoulder as I rummaged for Eddy’s high heels.

My mother stormed in with my aunt behind her, both of them on the same side at last. “Are you mishuga? You’re going out with a Talyener goy who’s ten years older than you? On New Year’s Eve yet?” My aunt bellowed each question louder than the last. “New Year’s Eve, when the goyim get schicker, drunk? In a truck?”

“I’m not a baby!” I yelled. “I’m going.” I grabbed the silver high heels I’d just found and the strapless gown from my bed, then locked myself into the bathroom, to dress and comb my hair in peace. What was this? All of a sudden they were going to tell me what to do? Since when?

“What’s going on here? What’s the commotion?” It was Fanny now, come to join the fracas because she’d heard Rae and my mother pounding on the bathroom door. “Are you crazy?” she said when they told her. “You’ll let her go in a truck with a man?” I kept dressing.

My mother and aunt sobbed more words on the other side of the door; “Goy” was the one that came through clearest. I squirted some Emir on my hair.

Then the doorbell rang, and rang again, and then Chuck knocked on the screen door and called “Hello? Hello?” I threw open the bathroom door and ran past my mother and my aunt and Fanny, kicking a fusillade on the floor with my silver stilts, gripping the bottom of my gown so I wouldn’t trip. “Let’s go!” I shouted, banging the screen door behind me, pulling on Chuck’s tuxedo sleeve. I ran, Chuck ran; my mother, Rae, and Fanny ran too.

“What’s happening?” Chuck shouted, wheezing beside me. I glanced as we ran and saw his caterpillar eyebrows, a clear plastic box with a purple bow that he clutched in his hands, his tuxedo that shone a rust color by the light of the street lamp and looked high at his ankles. I didn’t know if I felt like laughing or crying. Then I did both, at the same time, as we flew up Dundas Street. “What’s wrong?” he shouted again, and I just shook my head and kept running and sobbing and giggling. The white carnation in his buttonhole dropped, and my silver heel trampled it.

His truck was all the way up the block. Over my shoulder I saw that my mother and Fanny had given up, but Rae was right behind us, then right behind me when I opened the door on the passenger side. She pushed me aside, hoisted herself like a gymnast up into the seat, then settled her squat frame there, arms folded and face stony. “You’re not going!” she yelled at me.

“Lady, please get out of my truck!” Chuck cried.

She didn’t budge.

How dare she carry on like this when she’d left me alone all those years with my mother in Fanny’s furnished room? How dare she butt in now, when my childhood was over? “Rae, get out! Dammit! The whole neighborhood is looking,” I hollered, though the streets were empty.

“Not till you go back into the house.” She glared at me, unfolded her arms, then emphatically folded them the other way.

“I’ll . . . I . . . I’m calling the cops to get her out of my truck,” Chuck sputtered. His face and ears were red. I could see the plastic box with an orchid corsage inside sitting on the sidewalk.

“You should be ashamed of yourself. A grown man with a fourteen-year-old girl!” My aunt yelled at him now, and her heavy jaw jutted forward like a bulldog’s. “You think I don’t know what you want?”

“I don’t care what you say. I’m going out tonight!” I screamed at her.

“Do you know what men like that do?” she screamed back.

“Lady, get out!” Chuck banged on the hood with a mallet fist, and with each bang I could see Rae’s maroon hat jump a little on her head.

An hour later my aunt descended from the truck, her eyes puffy with weeping. I stepped up to take her place, as though triumphant. But I was acting. By now I was really tired and miserable, and what I truly wanted was to go home, with her, to forget the whole awful scene and Chuck and New Year’s Eve—all of it. I watched her walk down the empty street.

Chuck jumped behind the wheel, breathing as though he’d just done hard physical labor, and I could see his temple throbbing. As we drove off, I spied the orchid, still on the sidewalk in its clear plastic box with the big purple bow.

“Chuck . . . I’m sorry.” I was embarrassed for all of us that she’d accused him as she did. I touched his white-knuckled hand that gripped the wheel, but he pulled away as though he were disgusted with me. I sat, baffled about what to say or do next.

He drove to our spot on City Terrace. “I don’t feel like going to a nightclub now,” he muttered. “I didn’t do anything to deserve that.” His voice rose like a little boy’s and he pounded his fist on the dashboard so hard that the truck shook.

It scared me a little, though I couldn’t blame him for being so upset. “Chuck . . .” I opened my mouth to sympathize, to say how angry I was at my aunt, but he turned to me and grabbed me, his fingers digging into my bare arms, then his tongue thrusting down my throat, his stubble scratching my skin and hurting. I fought to break loose but he pinned me. With one hand he snatched at the long skirt of my gown, tugging it up. The more I struggled, the harder he gripped me. His fingers wrestled with my garter belt, with the band of my panties; his knees pushed at my thighs. “Chuck, stop!” I screamed.

And he did. He loosened his hold on me, then moved back to the driver’s seat, his breath coming in whistles through his mouth. He gripped the wheel and banged his head on it, again, then again. “I’m an idiot,” he moaned. “She just got me so angry.” He slumped over the wheel and stayed that way for so long that I thought he’d fainted. My teeth chattered as if I were sitting in a refrigerator. What should I do?

When he snapped his head up, I jumped. “We’re going to Evelyn’s party,” he announced, backing the truck out of the weeds so quickly that the tires spun. I pressed up against the passenger door, moving as far away from him as I could, and he didn’t say another word. I wasn’t scared of him now as much as I was angry. Where had that monster sprung from that tore at my clothes and hurt me with his hands and mouth? What had that been about?

I followed Chuck up the Frombergs’ steps, and Evelyn swung open the door. Over Chuck’s shoulder I could see that people were kicking in a conga line. Evelyn blew loudly at an orange noisemaker that snaked from her lips and then shouted, “Hap-py New Year!” She wore a tiny gold cardboard tiara on her head and a red and purple gown sausaged her big body. He entered first. Then she took one look at me and her jaw dropped. “You bastard, get out,” she spat at Chuck. “You son of a bitch!”

How had she known?

“Okay, okay.” He threw up his hands as if he were fending off a blow. “You’re right. I’m a bastard son of a bitch.” Then he slunk off like a kicked alley cat—even more pathetic because of the funny tuxedo. I could hear Evelyn breathing through her teeth. I kept my eyes on him till he turned the corner, and then she drew me to her big bosom in a motherly hug. “Sweetie, go change and then come back to the party,” she said gently. I left, fighting back the rush of tears that her kindness had loosed. It wasn’t really his fault. Rae had made him angry. But why did he have to terrify me? I was mad at him, but I was also sorry that he might lose Evelyn’s friendship and, because of me, never sit in her kitchen and sip coffee again.

My mother was in bed with the light off, and the house was mausoleum-quiet. As a kid, I used to panic when I couldn’t see her breathing or hear her snoring: What if she were dead? Standing now at the threshold, wide-eyed in the spook-filled dark, I listened as I used to. I shouldn’t have left her alone. I heard a squeak of springs as she turned over.

Then I tiptoed into the bathroom, closed the door behind me, and turned on the light. For an instant I didn’t recognize the girl in the mirror. Now I saw what Evelyn had seen. My cheeks and chin were blotchy red from the friction of Chuck’s stubble, my lips blurry with lipstick smear, my hair wild. I looked like I’d been raped.

 

It had been three years since Irene signed me to an exclusive management contract, and though Lillian Foster had done scores of shows in the pink gown, Irene had called them all “charity performances.” “It’s good experience and exposure,” she told the troupe in her mellow amber voice. Despite my crush, I wondered what good the experience and exposure could do when she didn’t send me out on a single Hollywood audition. How would I ever earn money to help my mother? Years had passed, and I’d accomplished nothing toward her rescue. The hot seasons were still the worst, when she came home dripping and exhausted from Schneiderman’s unventilated top floor and the steam of the pressing machines. “Save me from the shop!” she cried, flopping on her bed in a dress wet with sweat, as in New York; but now it was to the ceiling that she cried, as though she’d lost faith in our dream. I’d lost faith too.

One Saturday, tacked on the wall above the briny pickle barrels in the grocery store, I saw a penciled message in Yiddish and English, “Shadchen, Matchmaker,” it said. “I will find you Your Besherteh, Your Destined Mate. Reasonable Rates!” It was signed “Mr. Yehuda Cohen.”

My mother had sent me to get a quart of milk, but I almost forgot. I stared at the wrinkled piece of paper with the shaky handwriting for a long time. My mother needed rescuing, and as hard as I’d tried, I hadn’t been able to do it. What if I gave her into someone else’s loving hands now—like a poor woman who couldn’t take care of her baby might give it to a rich woman who’d be so happy to have it? A few days later, I went back to the grocery store after school and wrote Mr. Cohen’s telephone number on the inside cover of my geography notebook. For a week or more I kept looking at it as I sat in my classes. By now, though I could scarcely admit it to myself, I knew there was another reason too that made me want to call Mr. Cohen: I’d begun to understand that if I were all she had in the world, I’d never be able to live my own life. Someday I’d want to do things, to travel places . . . like Chicago, maybe . . . or France. With my mother in tow, how far could I travel? I wouldn’t even be able to go to college if I always had to take care of her. I hated my selfish thoughts, but I couldn’t help them: I needed to give her to someone else—a husband.

 

My mother sat on the milk crate looking out at nothing, her face blank, as if she were a million miles away. She wore a torn plaid wrapper—her weekend uniform these days.

“Mommy? I’ve been thinking a long time about something.” I knelt at her feet, pausing dramatically, to impress on her the seriousness of what I was about to say. “You can’t keep working in the shop. We need to find you a husband.”

“A husband?” She jumped as though I’d waved something noxious in front of her nose. “What do I need a husband for?”

“Mommy, listen to me,” I kept on: “I don’t think I’ll ever get my break in Hollywood; I can’t help you.” I came back to it every hour; I dogged her. “We don’t want to live in a furnished room at Fanny’s forever.” “Your spells are worse when you get so tired out by your work. It’s killing you!” It was all true.

“Who’d even want me now?” she said that afternoon in front of the dresser mirror, turning her head at different angles to scrutinize the extent of the wrinkles on her face, the extent of the sag under her chin. I could tell she’d started thinking seriously about it, though she was still far from convinced.

That evening she poured borscht from a Manischewitz bottle into two bowls for our supper. “Moishe . . .” she began.

I didn’t want to hear it. “Mommy, he’ll never want us. And I hate that bastard! I hate him!” I screamed. Slam went my hand on the table, and my mother cringed, and the red liquid jumped from the bowls and puddled on the oilcloth. I didn’t care. I had to convince her!

I searched the kitchen counter for a rag to sop up the spilt borscht. Finding none, I wadded old newspapers from the stack Fanny kept to put on the floor after she mopped on Friday afternoons. How could I make my mother understand? I blotted and rubbed at the spill, but my efforts left red streaks on the table. I threw the newspaper wad down, defeated, and sank onto a chair, covering my head with my hands. “I want a father in my life!” It popped out of my mouth as if I were Charlie McCarthy, and I stopped, shocked. Did I really, after fourteen and a half years without a father, feel that I needed one now? I’d always been happy there’d been no man to come between us. Then why had I said it?

“You want a father?” she cried.

I looked my mother in the eye. I couldn’t back out now. “Yes. I need a father.”

She sipped at her soup, taking quick, nervous slurps. I stared at the red liquid in my bowl. After that day, I always hated borscht.

 

Mr. Yehuda Cohen had a long white beard like the ones I’d seen in pictures of biblical patriarchs, and he wore the same long black overcoat in all seasons. He came to Dundas Street to examine us and set the terms—three dollars per introduction. He smelled of fried fish, but he sent a procession of potential beshertehs.

In consideration of the novelty of a gentleman caller, Fanny let us take the dusty, yellowed sheets off the furniture in the living room, where we’d never been allowed to sit before. (“The couch is old. I don’t have money to buy a new one when it falls apart,” she had always said.) I piled stacks of library books in front of the jars of floating eyeballs to hide them.

On the morning of my mother’s first date, I walked with her to the beauty parlor on Wabash Avenue so she could get a henna tint in her hair. That afternoon, as she let me dab my own rouge on her cheeks and brush her lashes with my Maybelline, I studied the face I’d loved so much. What would a suitor think? The years in East Los Angeles had really aged her. There were fine little wrinkles all around her eyes and deep lines between her eyebrows that gave her a permanently pained expression. Her cheeks, which had been firm and opalescent, looked saggy and sallow. I was stung by my love for her, which was even greater now that she no longer looked young and beautiful. “Please let him be nice to her. Please let him be a loving man,” I prayed to I-didn’t-know-who.

 

Jake Mann’s hair was marcelled into shiny, tight blond waves, and he wore electric blue or burnt sienna suits. “What a little doll!” he said in a gravelly voice as I went to the kitchen to fix him a glass of tea on his first visit. His fingers clasped my hand instead of the glass when I handed it to him, making the dark liquid slosh over the rim. “Oh, she burned her pretty fingers,” he said to no one in particular, relieving me of the glass and then lifting my hand to his mouth for a wet kiss—“to make it feel good.”

He invited my mother out for “cocktails.” “You’re invited too.” He winked at me.

“He’s a real sport,” my mother said, glowing, when she came back after midnight. I’d waited up, sleepless, missing her cruelly. “He took me to a nice place for a Tom Collins. Then he took me to Chinatown for a big dinner.” In her fingers she twirled a yellow toothpick-and-paper umbrella, which she proffered to me as though I were six years old. “It was in the Tom Collins,” she said, beaming.

I took it from her, holding it awkwardly in my palm. What was I supposed to do with it?

Mr. Mann came to take my mother out again the next week. “So where’s that little princess?” I could hear him from the bedroom.

“Why don’t you go say hello?” my mother asked me when she came in for her purse.

If she married Mr. Mann, we’d all have to live together until I finished high school. More than three years. So I had to be friendly. I followed her out. “Say, give us a hug,” Jake Mann said avuncularly. He pulled me to him, pressing himself against me for what seemed like a long time. I broke away, befuddled. My mother stood at the front door, purse in hand, smiling like a stranger, waiting for him. I’d never had a fatherly hug. Was I imagining things?

“He really knows how to treat a lady,” my mother said at the end of the evening, and her face looked bright and a little excited. I marveled how quickly she’d gotten into the spirit of this thing. She sat on her bed, and I watched as she rolled her seamed nylons down her still-lovely legs. “He’s a nice dresser, too. Not like Moishe,” she sighed, “but still nice. And he took me to an Italian restaurant, and then we went on a wonderful drive near the beach and saw the stars.” She enumerated Mr. Mann’s virtues and her pleasure. “On Sunday he wants to take us both to Ocean Park Beach,” she said, pulling her pale pink nightgown over her head.

I remembered Mr. Mann’s tight hug. “No, you go alone with him,” I said lightly, rummaging through my mind for an excuse that would keep me home.

“He wants to take us both. You come too,” my mother insisted, pulling the covers over herself. I got up to turn the light off, then lay in the dark in a muddle of feelings while my mother breathed softly in sleep.

 

“Whoop! Where’s the bathing suit?” Jake Mann exclaimed on Sunday morning when he saw me in a white skirt and blouse. “We’re all going swimming on such a beautiful day.”

My mother wore her green one-piece bathing suit under a floral print dress. “Put your suit on underneath,” she encouraged me. “It’s a beautiful day to go in the water.”

Jake Mann opened the rear door of his long automobile for me, and as I slid in, I felt his hand brush lightly against my buttocks. I turned to look at him, astonished. But what could I say there in his car, my mother in the front seat? Perhaps I’d imagined it, or maybe it was an accident.

In the beach parking lot he stripped down to his bathing suit, and my mother did the same. “We’ll lock our clothes in the trunk,” he said. “That way we don’t have to worry about them when we go into the water.” I disrobed, self-conscious, not knowing what else to do. He handed my mother a blanket to carry, and he took a little portable radio from the trunk.

I felt his eyes inspecting my black two-piece suit, my thighs, my breasts, as he walked between me and my mother down to the beach. I was aware of the oppressively huge expanse of his naked flesh next to me, the blond-gray hairs that covered his chest and legs and arms.

My mother spread the blanket, plopped down, snapped on the radio. “Hey there, you with the stars in your eyes,” she hummed along with Frank Sinatra.

“Let’s go for a swim!” Mr. Mann seized my hand and held me up just as I was about to sink down near her, onto the gay red and green stripes.

“I don’t know how to swim,” I told him, forcing myself not to sound sullen and pulling my fingers away. “Why don’t you two go?” I turned to my mother.

“You never taught her to swim?” he scolded. “What’s the idea of that? I’ll teach her.”

“Go, Lilly, let him teach you how to swim.” My mother smiled contentedly at the sun.

He pulled at my arm. “Up-sy!” He grinned and lifted me to my feet, ignoring my protestations that the water was too cold for me. “Don’t be a scaredy-cat,” he said.

I walked down to the water with him. How was I supposed to act? Didn’t my mother see that there was something funny in the way Mr. Mann behaved with me? And there was something else troubling me. I’d seen men in bathing suits before, of course, but the sight of Jake Mann down below was disquieting. His member looked huge under the flimsy red material of his trunks. Didn’t everyone see the funny way it protruded? Wasn’t he embarrassed by it? By the time we reached the water, the red strip looked like a little tent under his belly. Alarm fought with nausea inside me. Where could I put my eyes?

The water felt frigid on my feet. “Come on, don’t act like a teeny, tiny baby,” he mocked, dragging me by the hand. Would he drop my mother if I insulted him? How could I keep him for her but keep him away from me? I half went and half was pulled deeper into the water. I couldn’t protect my thighs, my belly, my chest, from its iciness. My teeth chattered.

“I’m going to teach you to swim,” he said, his voice still jovial and booming above the waves. “You’re old enough to know how, for God’s sake. Now lay down against my hand and I’ll show you to kick.” He pushed the back of my head down and my legs went up, then he held me afloat with his hand on my belly. At least the lower part of him was covered by the water and I didn’t have to see it. “Okay, keep your legs straight and kick. I’ve got you. Nothing to worry about,” he said now in a businesslike manner.

I couldn’t stop shivering. It was hard to breathe. I kicked as he commanded me to, and he moved us some steps farther from the shore. What if I couldn’t touch the ocean floor with my feet? What if the water was above my head? I would be at his mercy. The ocean was huge around us, and I didn’t know how deep it was below me now. I swiveled my head quickly to look at him, and water filled my nose. I coughed and sputtered and clutched at his arm.

“Don’t get scared. You’re doing good,” he told me. I relaxed my clutch and kept kicking. “Atta girl!” he said.

Then he righted me and dropped his hand from my belly. I could feel the bottom with my feet and sighed in relief. I stood on tiptoe to keep my head well above the water.

“Now, how about a little thank-you kiss for your first lesson.” He grinned hideously, a huge shark in the middle of the ocean. He pulled my chin up with one hand and clamped his mouth down on mine. With the other hand he pulled my buttocks toward his member.

I struggled, and the undulating water pushed me off balance. His mouth was hard on mine, his hand firm on my buttocks, keeping me upright. I felt him rub against me.

“Stop it,” I freed my mouth and shouted. There were other people in the water but no one close by. If I broke away from him, would I drown?

“Come on, be a good girl,” he said, knocking his hips against me, not relinquishing his hold on my buttocks. “Don’t you like it?”

“Goddammit, leave me alone!” I snarled in the most menacing voice I could muster. He tightened his grip, and my nails raked down his wet back with all the strength in my fingers. He dropped his hand, looked surprised and startled. I broke free and landed on tiptoe, my chin barely above the water. I swerved toward the shore, not looking back, my arms and hands flailing to push the ocean aside until I got to the shallow water.

“Little bitch,” I heard him sneer a good distance behind me. But he wasn’t following me. I hobbled frantically through the water and then over the sand, breathless, back to the blanket and my mother.

She sat there, still placid, innocent of thought. “That’s what a woman is for,” Peggy Lee was singing on the radio. “Where’s Jake?” my mother asked, smiling. “Did he show you how to swim?”

How could I answer her? I scrutinized the water, but he was nowhere in sight. Maybe he’d drowned.

This was the same strip of beach where I’d written IRENE SANDMAN over and over in the wet sand. I held the thought of her violet eyes now, like a holy relic.

Later Mr. Mann came lumbering, scowling and silent, across the sand. “How’d you get so many scratches? Your back’s bleeding,” my mother cried, touching his skin solicitously.

“I fell on those lousy rocks out there,” he said, tossing his hand in the direction of our combat.

Whenever the phone rang during the next weeks I heard my heart thud in my ears, but it was always for Fanny. “I don’t understand,” my mother said. “I thought we got along so good.” And then, maybe a month later, I saw her standing in front of the dresser mirror, her fingers lifting her cheeks. “I hear Marlene Dietrich had four facelifts,” she said.

“You don’t need a facelift. You’re beautiful,” I told her, meaning it, but she didn’t seem to hear me.

“‘Mary, you have such shining eyes, such lichtege eigen,’ Moishe used to say to me,” my mother sighed. “All gone now. Nothing left of it.”

 

I kept my secret about why Jake Mann had disappeared because I thought it was better for her to be a little hurt and baffled than to learn the truth. But anxiety squeezed at my chest whenever I thought of him. “Let’s forget the husband,” I wanted to tell my mother. Yet how could we? Nothing had changed. Not a single problem had gone away.

“So one don’t work out, what’s to worry?” Mr. Cohen said with good cheer. He had many more names on his list, and for three more dollars there was always another.

Shmuel Glatt, a redheaded German Jew, was next. Shmuel had numbers tattooed on his forearm from the concentration camp where he’d lost his whole family. He was stocky and short, barely taller than my mother. His small brown eyes had heavy undershadows that gave him a permanent lugubrious look, but he smiled a lot and told jokes in long strings, like Eddie Cantor or Jack Benny. His Yiddish accent was heavy, and it made his jokes, which were almost always about anti-Semites (antizsemeeten, he called them), funnier—or more disturbing. So Rasputin says to Czar Nikolai, “Your Majesty, the Jews are complaining that you’re anti-Semitic. For that, you should kill them all.” “They’re damn liars,” the Czar says. “I’m not anti-Semitic, and I’ll prove it. I’m only going to kill half of them.” So a Jew is walking in the street, and he bumps into a Nazi. “Swine,” says the Nazi. “Pleased to meet you. I’m Garfinkel,” the Jew says. So Mr. Horowitz goes into this nice restaurant and sits down. And the goy waiter comes over to him and says, “We don’t serve Jews here.” “That’s okay,” Horowitz says. “Jews I don’t eat. Give me a vegetable soup.”

My mother didn’t know how to react to Shmuel Glatt in the beginning, but later she laughed at his jokes, and I did too. She dressed in the New York clothes whenever he came, and she put on the Emir I’d bought her for Chanukah. In the months she went out with him, she had hardly any spells. I was a little sad that it wasn’t I who had the power to make them go away, but the important thing is, he’s good for her, I told myself.

“He’s a gentleman,” she said after their third or fourth date. I’d heard them on the porch. He asked her for “a kiss goodnight,” and there was a brief silence. “I had a very nice time, Shmuel,” she said less than a minute later, and then I heard her key in the door.

He’ll do, I thought. He even brought me Baby Ruth candy bars and Hershey with almonds, as though I were a kid, extracting them from a pocket on the inside of his jacket and presenting them to me with a magician’s flourish. If my mother had to marry someone—and she did—Mr. Glatt wouldn’t be a bad choice. He was all right.

It was his lantsman Falix Lieber, with whom he’d been liberated, barely alive, from the Bergen Belsen extermination camp, who became the bogeyman that lodged in my psyche and shook me for a long time.

“I got three free tickets for the Workmen’s Circle bazaar,” Shmuel Glatt announced one Saturday evening. “We’ll have pickelehs there, we’ll have gribbines mit schmaltz there, we’ll have bellyaches there,” he sang. It was there that my mother and I met Falix. “He helped me so much in the camp,” Shmuel said, serious now, clapping Falix’s back when he introduced him. Falix was in his thirties, with dusky skin and a soft black beard and hooded dark eyes set deep in his head. He wore a white shirt with half-rolled sleeves, his tattoo of numbers visible, like Shmuel’s. Falix kept an arm around his seven-year-old daughter, Shayna, to whom he spoke in Yiddish. “Maydeleh, little girl,” he called her. Later in the evening I watched as he fed her right out of his hand from the potato knish that he’d bought, lifting it to her pretty lips and then taking the tiniest nibble of the heavy dough himself, making her giggle immoderately.

“And you, maydeleh?” He turned to me after they’d finished the knish. “You want me to feed you too?”

I shook my head no, feeling foolish.

“And why not?” He winked at me. He followed us around the bazaar, never letting go of Shayna except to buy a dish of ice cream, which then he fed her and himself alternately, from the same spoon.

“So what do you do for a living?” he asked me.

Was he joking? Didn’t he know I was a kid? “I’m in junior high school,” I answered, discomfited by my own bashfulness. “In the ninth grade.”

“Without Falix there wouldn’t be a Shmuel Glatt here today,” I heard Shmuel tell my mother again, tears in his small eyes. We all sat together and waited for the balalaika concert to begin. “I was ready to die. What did I need to keep living for? ‘No,’ Falix says. ‘You have to show those bastards.’ He made me eat when I didn’t want to eat anything. He made me keep up my strength.”

The next Sunday, when Shmuel banged on our screen door, Falix was right behind him. “On such a nice day I’ve come to drive everybody to the park,” Falix announced. He wore a hat well back on his head, and the sleeves of his white shirt were rolled up again, exposing the terrible tattoo. “Madam.” He extended his arm for me to take in imitation of Shmuel, who walked down the porch steps with my mother on his arm.

“Come on, Lilly. You come too,” my mother said happily, still holding on to Shmuel’s arm as she stood near Falix’s old DeSoto.

“Madam?” Falix repeated more emphatically, his arm still extended at an exaggerated angle, and I took it, not knowing what else to do, and let him lead me into the front seat of his car. My mother and Shmuel climbed into the back.

“We better walk faster,” I told Falix in the park. He’d insisted we stroll arm-in-arm, like my mother and Shmuel, and I felt self-conscious and embarrassed. “They’re way ahead of us.”

“Yes, but who’s got the car keys?” he answered with a wink. “When they need to go home, they’ll come back and find us. Sit here.” He led me to a bench under a tree.

“They’ll be worried,” I said, struggling awkwardly to free my arm from his grip as we sat on the bench. Maybe he saved Shmuel’s life, but he was acting a little like Jake Mann, I thought. I was irritated with my mother for making me come with them and then abandoning me.

“Relax,” he said, placing his arm around my shoulder. “Who’s going to hurt you? Am I hurting you?” He lifted my chin and looked into my eyes. I tried to rise, but he pulled me back, planting his lips on mine, ignoring my push at his chest.

I wasn’t strong enough to get him away from me. Where was my mother? When would someone come by? Finally he took his mouth from mine. “Don’t you know how to kiss?” he whispered. “A big girl like you? What would it hurt if I showed you?” I struggled against him again, pushing at his shoulders, trying to clamp my mouth. It was useless. There was no more fight in me. I relaxed my hands, my lips. I let myself sink, like a drowned girl. My mother had disappeared. “Isn’t this nice?” he raised his head to say, and returned to my lips.

But then his hand cupped my breast, and a shiver waved through me when his fingers moved over my nipple. “Don’t,” I said with clenched teeth, and my hand flew up to stop him.

“Maydeleh, what’s the excitement?” he laughed and crooned. “What’s so bad here?” He bent to my lips again, his breath warm on me, his hand on my breast again. My own hand covered his, but I didn’t try to remove it.

He heard their voices at the same time I did, and he jumped up and settled two feet away from me on the bench. My mother and Shmuel were walking down the path toward us. I wanted to run to her, but what about Shmuel? I sat glued to the bench. Didn’t she see what Falix had been doing? Why didn’t she yell at him like My Rae had yelled at Chuck?

“You had a nice tree to sit under,” Shmuel said cordially.

“Yes,” my mother said. “It’s nice and shady here.”

 

If there was a Mrs. Lieber I never saw her, and I never saw little Shayna after that first time at the bazaar. When Shmuel came to court my mother now, Falix was almost always with him. Didn’t my mother understand what he was up to?

Falix talked to me as though I were an adult. He spared me nothing. “I have a good friend”—he was gleeful one Sunday—“who just married a beautiful lady with a beautiful daughter, fifteen.” He stretched the vowels out as though he were tasting delectable little bites of knish—“bee-ooo-tii-ful,” he said with feeling, and his eyes shone. “In the night he has the mother and in the day he has the daughter.” His hand cupped my knee, moved to my thigh.

“When my Shayna is twelve years old,” he said dreamily, a hint of melancholy in his voice, “I’ll find her a geliebte, a lover. A girl shouldn’t go longer than twelve without a man to love her.”

He crooned at me always, whether I was fighting him off or tired of fighting him off. He sought me in the kitchen, on Fanny’s crumbling back porch, in the bedroom as I sat on the floor doing my homework. Sometimes I let him touch me where he wanted, pretending more struggle than I felt. Then I hated myself for it.

But when I lay in bed, my mother asleep in the bed next to mine, and I remembered where and how he touched me, I was also overwhelmed by physical sensations in deep places where I’d never had them before. They weren’t like the sweet throbbings I’d had at night when I thought of Irene. They came in great scary waves and were out of my control. When I thought about Falix Lieber in the daylight my face flamed. Could people tell about that dark thing by looking at me?

It went on for a couple of months, and then Falix disappeared, along with Shmuel, just as Jake Mann had. I was relieved never to have to see Falix again and Shmuel, who brought him and must surely have guessed what was going on. But even years later, Falix Lieber sometimes sneaked up on me to scare me, to lull me, in fantasies that popped out of nowhere, crooning, “Maydeleh, what’s so bad here?”

 

I think my mother was really upset to be dropped by Shmuel. I know she’d felt a special link to him—they’d both suffered because of the Nazis, they’d both had terrible losses, and now they might help each other forget a little bit and snatch some happiness from life. But not even that had worked out. “I can’t no more,” my mother cried. “They don’t like me. I’m old. Who would want me now anyway?” She flopped on her bed and threw her eyes heavenward once again, and I stood at the door feeling more helpless than ever. I had no idea what we could do next.

But Yehuda Cohen had another one: Albert Gordin, “a nice, honest man,” the matchmaker said, collecting our three dollars and folding them into his moth-eaten wallet. “Has a steady job. A bachelor.” Mr. Cohen enumerated the new man’s virtues.

Albert arrived on a Sunday afternoon with a little bouquet of pink carnations wrapped in newspaper. He was seven or eight years younger than my mother. (She’d lied about her age to Mr. Cohen, and never—in twenty-five years—did Albert learn the truth.) He wore a new-looking plaid jacket that was too big across the shoulders and too long in the sleeves and a yellow-and-blue-striped tie that also looked new. He removed his hat from time to time—only to wipe his brow in the L.A. heat. When he lifted it, I could see two deep indentations on the top of his head, which was bald as a baby’s.

He didn’t offer to take my mother out anywhere. He got to the point, sitting on Fanny’s couch. “I’m looking to get married. Mr. Cohen says you’re looking for the same thing.”

“Yes, I wouldn’t mind getting married,” my mother said. Her voice sounded to me as shaky as a little old lady’s.

“Mr. Cohen told me you’re a good, honest person,” he said.

“Yes,” my mother said guilelessly.

“I make a good living. Not too much, but enough for a wife.”

“I wouldn’t have to work?” my mother asked, getting to the point herself. She’d had too many painful months to be coy now.

“Not you and not your daughter.”

“So I could stop my job right away if we got married?”

I held my breath.

“I’ll tell you,” he said. “My mother says to me a couple months ago, ‘Albert, I’m going, and now you have to settle down with a nice lady.’ And then she passes away. She was almost eighty-four years.” He swiped at a tear in the corner of his eye, but I don’t think my mother saw it because she was studying the floor as though the faded flowers of Fanny’s carpet were tea leaves that could foretell her future. “So if we like each other, we’ll get married right away and you don’t have to work no more, okay?” Albert asked.

The next day he came in the evening, right after my mother got home from work. He wasn’t going to waste any time. On this visit he was more relaxed and a lot more voluble. Whenever he was about to launch into a monologue he abruptly stood up. “Those doctors I work with at Cedars of Lebanon Hospital, they’re so smart,” he proclaimed, “they know everything—everything. You can ask them a question, any question you want, and they can tell you the answer. That’s how they got where they are.” He plopped down again on Fanny’s couch.

My mother nodded her head after each sentence, but her eyes looked glazed.

“Dr. Friedman, my big boss,” Albert said, standing up again, “he’s sooo rich that he’s not a millionaire—he’s a mul-ti-mill-ion-aire.” He punctuated every syllable with a pointed finger.

“Would you like some coffee?” I squeezed in between his monologues.

Albert shook his head no. “He writes a book and ev-er-y med-i-cal stu-dent in the whooole country has to buy it. It costs them one hundred dollars for a book by Dr. Friedman.”

After he left, I followed my mother to our room, and for a minute I thought we were going to do the chicken dance again, but she stopped her pacing after one turn and plopped down on her bed. I plopped with her. I could smell the sickly sweet dead-flower-and-sweat odor that her skin always had when she was really upset. We both stared up at the ceiling now, with eyes open like two corpses.

“Lilly, what should I do?” This after a long time.

“I don’t know!” I tried to think it out, but I couldn’t. Here was the person who might finally rescue her from the shop. But he was weird. Yet if he was a nice, honest man with a steady job, like Mr. Cohen said . . . But how could she live with him?

The next time we heard Albert’s steps on the porch and his banging at the front door, my mother pulled frantically at my arm, even though I was doing my math homework. “You come too and sit with us,” she implored.

“Why? You’re fine,” I whispered, and extricated myself from her clutch. He didn’t require much conversation from her—she didn’t need my help in that area. But I could see in her eyes that she wasn’t fine. I wasn’t either. She went, head down, as if to her death. I sat on my bed, chewing my nails. I couldn’t even add five plus five now. I jumped up to join her.

“Without me,” Albert, on his feet, was saying, “the doctors can’t do nothing. I’m the one who knows where everything is,” and down he plopped again.

“I’m the one who keeps the knives sharpened for them,” he rambled the next time he came. “‘Albert,’ they tell me, ‘without a sharp knife I’m lost.’ I’m in the pathology labatory almost all the time.”

I didn’t know what a pathology laboratory was. He cleaned, he straightened things up, I figured out. He kept doctors’ instruments in order. It took me a while to understand that it was autopsies he was cleaning up after, and that one of his main jobs was to be sure that the scalpels and saws were sharp. My guts twisted at the insight, but I never told my mother. Why upset her needlessly?

A few weeks later, Albert arrived holding more carnations wrapped in newspaper, a bouquet identical to the first one. In his other hand he carried a small box. As soon as I opened the door I knew something was different.

“Lee-lee,” he pronounced my name. “Hullo.” His nervousness was palpable. “I have news for your mother. Where is she?”

My mother came out, as scared as he. I retreated to the bedroom.

“Look what I bought for you,” I heard through the walls less than a minute later.

“Oh, my God!” my mother exclaimed.

“So, you want to get married now?” Albert asked seconds after that.

I covered my eyes with my hands. I covered my ears, my mouth. Oh, God! Oh, my God! I did the chicken dance by myself up and down our room. Then I forced myself to stop. He doesn’t try to put dirty paws on me. I sat on my bed, repeating his good points like a mantra: he has a job, he’ll let my mother quit the shop.

As soon as the screen door closed behind him, my mother rushed to our room. On her face was animal panic. On her left hand was a gold ring with a tiny diamond. “Lilly, what should I do? Tell me!”

I flew to her, held her tight, as in a death grip. “I don’t know,” I cried. Then, into her shoulder, “Marry him, Mommy.” My voice sounded in my ear as if it came from underwater.

I felt her nod her head, again and again, as though she was agreeing, convincing herself.

The next evening Albert showed up with two immaculately tailored men in their fifties, both bald, one tall and big-bellied, his forehead showing blue veins, and the other inches shorter, with a round, fat face. A new pastel blue Cadillac convertible, which I’d seen before only in billboard ads, was parked in front of the house. “This . . . this is my older brother Jerry, and this is my . . . other older brother Marvin.” Albert’s expression was sheepish, like a kid’s whose parents have come to school on account of his bad behavior. They sat down on Fanny’s couch, Albert hemmed in between his brothers.

“Albert says he wants to marry you,” Jerry, the shorter one, said to my mother.

“Did he tell you he was in a mental institution for three years?” Marvin asked, a businessman with no words to waste.

Their family had emigrated from Russia to Mexico at the start of the 1930s because they couldn’t get into the United States. Jerry told the story while Albert looked down at his shoes. Marvin and Jerry became jewelers—big successes, I gathered. Albert, still in his teens, wandered off to work with a traveling peddler, and in the heat of Vera Cruz, “a hundred and fifteen degrees,” Jerry emphasized, he had to be hospitalized. “He had a nervous breakdown.”

“Do you understand?” Marvin asked my mother, staring at her with cruel, ironic eyes. “He went crazy. They even had to do an operation and open his head.”

“To save his life,” Jerry added quickly.

Marvin ignored him. “You still want to marry Albert?” His mean mouth smirked.

Now Albert looked up and rose to his feet. “I’m not crazy no more,” he uttered with a quiet dignity that I hadn’t seen in him before.

“Yes, he’s all right now. He’s not stupid, you understand,” Jerry said, as though Albert, who stood near my mother now, weren’t in the room. “He holds down a job and he can speak five languages—Russian, Polish, Yiddish, Spanish, English,” he enumerated. “And he reads Hebrew better than a lot of rabbis.” Jerry sounded almost proud of his poor younger brother.

“He’s all right now,” Marvin agreed, “but we thought you needed to know about it. Now we wash our hands, and what you do is your business.” He got up to leave at once, holding the screen door open peremptorily for both his brothers. Albert gave my mother a shame-faced, pleading, backward glance.

From the window I watched them usher Albert down the steps and into the back seat of the Cadillac. I felt sorry for him, how he’d sat hemmed in between the fat-cat brothers, disgraced like a culprit. Yet how could my mother marry him? I ran to her. “Mommy, what should we do?” I cried.

My mother was bent over the couch, patting smooth the yellowed sheet where the brothers had sat. Then she straightened, shrugged her shoulders high, and let them fall. “They told me he’s not stupid, he keeps a job.” She sighed. “I’ll marry him. What else can I do?”