The summer of 1948 my brother Davy was killed in an accident with a man who would have given his own life rather than have it happen. The man was Italian, and for my mother, Ada Leibritsky, that was explanation enough for why he was a killer. Had he been Irish, she would have said the same. Had he been Polish, or Greek, or even some kind of Protestant, she’d have likewise put the blame on that. Back then it was common enough to think this way, to be suspicious, even hateful, of outsiders, and the Negroes and Jews got the worst of it. So had the man been Jewish, like us, I’ve often wondered if in her mad grief my mother would have attributed the killing to that. Kike, she would have called him in her rage, not noticing that in so doing she’d have missed entirely that it was us, her family, a whole body of Jews, who were more to blame than anyone else.
The summer began typically enough. We arrived at our beach cottage in Woodmont, Connecticut, and my mother flew from the car, determined as always to be the first inside, leaving the rest of us—her three children, her older sister, and her only niece—behind. She rushed up the porch steps, unlocked the door, and strode into the living room. The place was dim, with shades drawn and lights off, and the air was stuffy from three seasons of windows locked shut. Still, from the way she breathed, gulping in the unstirred air as if it were fresh from the shore, you’d think she’d been starved for the stuff. From the living room she looked behind her, at me, on the porch, reluctant to follow her lead until at least one window had been cracked. “Oh, Molly,” she said in a voice that was almost scolding. “We’re here. Here. What in the world are you waiting for?”
We’d almost not gotten there, at least that week, the first one in July, for my father had been sick with a cold over the weekend and couldn’t drive us to Woodmont from our home in Middletown. On Monday he’d felt better but had to go to work. Monday night, after a glum dinner—my mother, two brothers, and I sighing dolorously and effectively throughout—my father had suggested that my older brother, Howard, just graduated from high school, could drive us the next day, Tuesday, as long as he came back on Friday to pick up my father and our uncle Leo for the weekend.
From Middletown we’d be two families in the car: ours and my mother’s sister Vivie’s. But neither woman could drive. Neither could their other sister, Bec, who was to meet us there, traveling from New Haven.
Howard, then, was our only hope. He promised my father that he’d come back on Friday early, in time to join the morning minyan.
My father was a serious man; everyone knew that. But Howard’s words made him beam with joy. Still, he leaned forward, peered over his glasses, and warned, “Howard, sometimes all a man has is his word.”
“Here’s mine,” Howard said, his voice confident, his tone sincere. The two shook hands. Then the whole family, especially Howard, cheered.
But upon our arrival at Woodmont, Howard was less genial, more himself. As he stood by my father’s old Dodge station wagon, unloading suitcases, he yelled, even to our mother, “Hey, nitwits, get your fat fannies over here and help.”
My mother didn’t budge. At forty years old she was still the family beauty, her mass of mahogany hair, pinned up, only just beginning to sprout the occasional gray. A middle child, she was the most forceful of the three Syrkin sisters, and the most opinionated, which had something to do with her beauty, the extra confidence it gave her. She was the certain one, the one who told us that Bess Truman’s idea about her daughter, or any daughter, was right: she should most definitely not become president. And in our world of interethnic hatred, she was the one, spewing forth slurs, who could hate right back. But at that moment, even though from the living room she’d heard Howard well enough—a rudeness he’d never dare in front of our father—she was silent and statuesque, her big black pocketbook, a near appendage of weathered patent leather, dangling from the crook of her bent elbow, her back straight, her head raised, her eyes once again closed, her whole being seemingly intoxicated by the cottage’s oppressive air.
A moment later, though, she came to and charged through the front doorway. She’d just returned to the porch and had opened her mouth to address Howard—apologize, I hoped she’d say—when her eye caught the mezuzah nailed to the doorframe, its pewter casing glinting from the sun. At the sight of it she closed her mouth, was silenced.
Even though he was a religious man, my grandfather Maks Syrkin had waited to nail the mezuzah there until he’d paid off the cottage’s mortgage in June of 1939. For value received, we the undersigned, Maksim and Risel Syrkin, hereby agree to pay to the order of The Bank of New Haven $3,600.… The mortgage papers were dated 1915, which put him at twenty-four years in violation of Jewish law: and you shall inscribe these words upon the doorposts of your house and upon your gates. Yet for all those years my grandfather, who never missed a mortgage payment, didn’t consider the cottage his home. Like his house in Middletown, the Woodmont cottage was not a home until every last cent of it had been paid for, he’d told his family again and again, and then he’d told the Woodmont neighbors—Jews all of them—and then, once we were born, he told us, his grandchildren, though we were too young then to understand the rules of Judaism much less the rules of real estate. I remember my grandfather Maks as a strange old man.
Howard, still by the Dodge, continued his rant. “Is this Egypt? Is that sand out there the desert?” he called. I was still on the porch, by my mother’s side, and from there I watched Howard point ahead, toward the beach and Long Island Sound. “What am I,” he continued, “your goddamned slave?”
Our cousin Nina, then fifteen, was the one to yell back to him, “You’re the one treating us like slaves!”
Howard wasn’t the only one startled by Nina’s remark. I was too, for Nina had been virtually silent the entire road trip from Middletown to Woodmont, paging through Darwin’s On the Origin of Species the whole hour. “Is it good?” I’d interrupted once to ask. I also liked to read, but mostly about twelve-year-old girls, like myself. Nina’s answer was quick. “Fantastic,” she’d said, her face, heart-shaped and pretty, tense with concentration. But until she rebuked Howard she’d not said a word since.
Following her remark, Nina simply stopped, halfway between the car and the cottage. Like her mother, she was short, and her hair, the same thick and unruly brown mane of all the women in the family, was pulled back with a ribbon. She wore shorts and an unusually tight summer jersey. You could see that she already had a marvelous figure, even at fifteen. But from everything I knew about Nina I was certain the jersey wasn’t tight for effect; Nina was just too absorbed with the likes of Darwin to notice. My mother had a saying about Nina: “She’s too smart for her own good.”
It was Howard who couldn’t take his eyes off the tight shirt. “Hey Nina, can you and your bazooms hike it over here?” he said next.
“That’s brilliant, Howard. You’re a genius, aren’t you?” Nina snapped back. She strode over, arched her neck, and even though she blushed, she looked him straight in the eyes.
Everyone knew Howard’s grades didn’t compare to Nina’s.
“Ouch, ouch,” he teased, reaching behind her as if threatening to snap her bra strap.
“Don’t be an ass,” she told him, then slapped Howard’s arm down.
For a moment it looked as if a fight, as much physical as verbal, would break out between them. But the tension eased when my aunt Vivie rushed off the porch to step between the two, who were often enough at odds with each other. The problem, or so it seemed, was generational: everyone knew my mother had stolen my father from Vivie, and though the sisters no longer fought with each other, their respective firstborns—like biblical characters, born into their animosity—seemed unable not to.
“Don’t be mean,” Vivie told Howard calmly, her hand on his shoulder. “We just got out of the car. Give us a minute, won’t you, to stretch our legs?”
My mother still wasn’t paying attention to the goings-on by the Dodge. Rather, transfixed by the sight of the mezuzah, she reached up and touched the pewter casing. Then she brought her hand to her lips and kissed the fingers that had reached for the words of God. But she wasn’t religious, I knew, only nostalgic. She would have preferred just then to have touched the skin of her father rather than the metal of the mezuzah’s casing, but Maks had died six months after that last mortgage payment in 1939. My mother, Ada, was thirty-two years old then and heavily pregnant with my younger brother Davy, her third child. Maks was seventy-four.
A Friday morning, cloudy, the last week of June 1939, and Maks held the mezuzah in one hand, a hammer in the other. In his shirt pocket were any number of slim nails, and in his left pants pocket were eight more encased mezuzot, enough for all the doorways inside and the back door. Risel, his wife, the woman to whom he’d been matched all those years ago in his birth town of Balta, the woman whom he’d returned to Balta to fetch some five years after his start in America, a woman transformed by her journey across the world from a confident Russian girl to a bewildered and dependent American wife, a woman whom Maks loved endlessly nonetheless, was to have the privilege of holding the first mezuzah, to be nailed to the front entrance. We had all gathered on the cottage porch: Maks and Risel, my mother and Vivie and Bec, and the grandchildren then born—Howard, Nina, and a three-year-old me. Though it was only eleven in the morning, Risel already wore her best Shabbos dress, along with seamed stockings and heels, and Maks had on a necktie, which flapped as the ever-present breezes of early summer crossed the porch. My mother and her sisters wore bathing suits as always, though out of respect for the occasion they had covered them with day dresses, belted and short sleeved. Only we kids showed up in our usual Woodmont wear of swimsuits with sandy bare feet. The fathers, working still in Middletown, would hear about the event—the clothes, the breeze, the lifting clouds, the unborn child kicking for the first time in my mother’s stomach, the tears welling in Risel’s eyes—when they joined us later for our Shabbos meal. The ceremony began: Baruch atah Adonai, Eloheinu melech haolam, Maks began chanting, and when he finished the blessing, Risel turned, pressed the mezuzah to the doorway, angled the thing just so, and my grandfather placed and then hit the first nail.
Vivie repeated her request to Howard. “Can you give us a minute?” This time she squeezed his shoulder and added, “Honey. Please.”
“Honey?” Nina muttered incredulously, causing Vivie to raise an index finger to Nina’s lips.
“Sorry,” Howard said to Vivie, the rising blush on his face matching Nina’s fading one. Vivie, calm as ever, could do this: soften Howard’s hardness. She then leaned into the back of the Dodge and pulled out a bag of groceries. Nina, too, reached for a bag. Howard remained standing amidst the suitcases he’d already unloaded, staring at them as if deciding which to carry in first. But just then he spotted Davy—who up until that moment had been standing unnoticed beside him—lugging up the porch steps a suitcase almost as large as his eight-year-old frame.
“Squirt!” Howard called, running to him. He reached for the suitcase.
“I can do it,” Davy protested.
“I know you can,” Howard said as he tugged at the suitcase. “I just want to help.”
Davy was small but strong, a baseball star in the making, our father hoped. When Howard, with a good ten years on Davy, pulled at the suitcase, Davy pulled back. “I can do it,” he said again, sure of himself. But when Howard tugged harder, the suitcase flew from Davy’s grip.
Suddenly off balance, Davy fell backward. He rolled from the middle step of the porch to its first, and then to the ground.
“See?” Nina called. “See what you did, Howard? Genius.”
I ran off the porch to help Davy, but by the time I got there Howard had him by one arm and Nina by the other. His left knee was scraped but not bleeding. He had another scrape on his left elbow.
“You okay?” we all asked. My mother, still at the front doorway, called the loudest.
You never knew. That was my grandfather Maks’s sense of things and the reason he’d waited so long to hang the mezuzah. You never knew. After all, so many times during Maks’s youth in Russia the family had been driven from their home in the middle of the night. Balta was home, then it wasn’t, then it was again. But you never knew, after that first exile, how long any home would last. And then Maks’s father had died just outside of Balta, the man and the horse he was astride frozen while riding home with firewood one blizzard-ridden February night. Maks was nine then, and because his mother had asked him to go out searching he had found the man himself, had touched the horse’s icy lips, then his father’s boots, lodged forever in stirrups, then his equally unmovable hands, frozen to the reins, before his own screaming set in.
“You okay?” I asked Davy again. As I inspected his scraped elbow Davy jerked it away.
“I can do it,” Davy told me, just like he’d told Howard a moment ago, though this time, hands empty, he wasn’t making sense. Still, because he clearly wanted to be left alone, I returned to my mother’s side.
“He’s all right?” she asked me, and I nodded, turning Davy’s way to be sure.
Below us, at the bottom of the porch steps, Nina glanced over Davy’s head, which put her, chin raised, eye to eye with Howard. “See what you did?” she said again.
If it was predictable that my mother would be the one to open the cottage, to be the first to grab at that cottage air, however intolerable it actually was, then what came next was equally predictable. My mother and my aunt Vivie stood beside each other in the living room, Vivie’s arms full with two bags of groceries, my mother’s arms empty except for her dangling pocketbook. They looked at each other, then at the couch, a sofa bed that Nina and I would share all summer. Lifting the corner of a sheet that covered it, Ada patted the worn brown plaid then nodded Vivie’s way. In the same manner, and without thinking yet to relieve Vivie of even one bag of groceries, Ada turned to the two armchairs in the front corners of the room, also covered by sheets. To watch my mother nod at the chairs, though, you’d think she could see right through the white cloth. An uncovered, dusty side table held a ceramic-tiled ashtray, and when Ada lifted the cheap thing, she and Vivie both sighed then said, in near unison, “Daddy’s Sunday cigars.” There was the photo hanging on the wall over the sofa bed to acknowledge too. Approaching it, Vivie finally set the groceries down. I stood in the doorway and watched.
Framed and fading, the shot was of their parents, in late June 1939, before their deaths within the next year—Maks of a heart attack, Risel, six months later, of heartache—two stocky souls in the bulky bathing attire of the past, sitting side by side on beach chairs, Maks Syrkin clutching Risel’s hand as if prescient of the separation death would soon bring.
Davy, by then inside, was the first to grow impatient with just looking. Turning from the photo, he raced, fully recovered from his earlier spill, past the radio console, almost knocking it over, until he came to the glass doors on the far side of the room. He opened them in time for Ada and Vivie to step through and into the sunporch, a room that contained a folding cot and dresser, along with a wicker chair and side table. This was the room of their younger sister, Bec, and because of its identification with her I knew my mother and Vivie wouldn’t step into it again for the rest of the summer. But just then they glanced about it, sighed some more, then cranked its many windows open.
From the sunporch the women made their way back through the living room and into the dining room, its oak dining table covered by yet another sheet, which the sisters expertly yanked off then dropped to the floor in a heap. We children, all of us silently following the mothers from room to room—as if this annual rite of examining the place was intrinsically about our well-being rather than about their past—knew that in the next hour we’d have to shake out that sheet and all the others before folding them and tucking them away. The dining room also contained a china cabinet for the best dishes, used only for Shabbos, and a sideboard stuffed with serving platters, pitchers, tablecloths, napkins, and the like. All of it came from Maks and Risel and was included in the sisters’ shared inheritance of the cottage. The dining room’s only other furnishings were a small table holding a telephone, and a simple chair set beside it.
My mother lifted the phone’s receiver, having promised my father that she’d call when we arrived. By this time, just past one in the afternoon, my father, Mort, in Middletown, would have returned from his after-lunch walk up and back Main Street. Satisfied with the morning’s business—ten customers, six sales—he’d be standing in the doorway of his store, staring out the front window. Everyone who passed Leibritsky’s Department Store would know him and wave, and he would wave back, solemnly. Nelson, his bachelor brother and the store’s co-owner, would be downstairs in the basement, placing a needle on the new recording of Benny Goodman that he planned to listen to while on his post-lunch break. Leo Cohen, my father’s brother-in-law and Vivie’s husband, would be alone in the back office, nibbling a bologna sandwich as he read, slowly, about Darwin’s meticulous studies of mold, an early work. For years already Leo had passed his best reads on to Nina and in so doing had recently gotten his daughter hooked on this particular and, in Uncle Leo’s words, “uncannily patient” man.
My mother knew all this, could no doubt picture it in her mind. Phone to her ear, she listened to the buzz of the dial tone as if it were a voice on the summer party line. Then, without dialing, she put the receiver down.
The kitchen was our next stop, but outside its doorway another photograph called for attention, one my father had hung there. Taken in 1942, it showed Davy atop Mort’s shoulders as my father, along with a crowd of Woodmont Jews, walked the length of Woodmont to protest the imprisonment of European Jews—five thousand or so, we thought then—a way of showing the world, however much of it would take note, that they knew what was going on; yes, the Jews of Woodmont knew. In the photo my father, wrapped like the other men in his sacred tallis, was his usual serious self, but Davy had thought the event a festival. Davy pointed. “Me,” he said, smiling just as he was in the photograph. “Us,” my mother answered. She took his hand and moved it across the scene in a sweeping motion that seemed to include the six million that by 1948 we understood to be not merely imprisoned but killed. “Us,” she said again.
We entered the kitchen, then, the way my father wanted us to: reminded of our luck. And there it was, in the speckled linoleum floors and counters, and in the table, a white porcelain enamel top with steel legs, but most especially in the automatic washer, recently purchased from Sears, Roebuck, without a wringer on top. Moving upstairs, the six of us stopped first at the master bedroom, the largest bedroom, at the cottage’s front, which, because my mother had married first and had the most children, she felt entitled to claim. Moving along, we paraded down the hall, past the cottage’s only full bathroom, where an old tub with high sides and clawed feet was the centerpiece. A bit ludicrously, in a way that made us laugh, everyone leaned in to wave at the beloved thing. At the far end of the hallway was a second bedroom, plain enough, shared by Vivie and Leo. Finally we landed at the snug third bedroom midway between the two others, which Davy shared with Howard. Of the twin beds almost touching, Davy’s was the one on the left, and after running a few steps, he managed a flying leap from the doorway onto it. Then he righted himself and began jumping. Before my mother could order him to stop he’d already bounced on the mattress several times, declaring with each airborne lift, “I’m free! I’m free!”
Yes, we were here, as my mother had first noted. Here: this cottage, the one she and her sisters had grown up spending their summers in, the one her father—a handyman who developed a knack for distinctive cabinetry—had bought and was able to hold on to, even throughout the Depression.
The cottage was itself part of a small complex of cottages, all of them crowding in on each other, set at times three deep between the road and the beach, and not in an orderly line but rather a haphazard clustering. Before ours, but not entirely blocking the view of the Sound, was the Isaacsons’. Beside us lived the Radnicks. Next to them came the Weinsteins. And on and on it went, one family after another, one cottage after the next. And this too, this familiar and messy collection of cottages, is what my mother meant by here.
Here: the shore, that small piece of it unofficially called Bagel Beach, which was our beach, the Jews’. We were among the many Jewish families throughout Connecticut (and a few from Massachusetts and New York as well) who funneled down to this spot where some of us owned cottages, some rented, and others stayed in seaside hotels, but all of us kept close, crowded, because in 1948 there were so many places Jews still couldn’t go, so many covenants, formal and informal, restricting us from neighborhoods, resorts, clubs—you name it. The genocide in Europe had yet to change that. But here, in this hamlet, we could be. Near the intersection of Merwin and Hillside avenues were Jewish bakers and butchers, and even a one-room Orthodox synagogue—the Woodmont Hebrew Congregation—a building of white clapboard, in the New England way. But its door had recently been painted bright blue, which was hardly a Yankee touch. Rather, it gave the place the vibrant colors of Israel. “Aren’t you adorable,” Howard had said that past May, when, at the news of Israel’s independence, I’d compared Bagel Beach, a small and sandy place that offered solace to the Jews of Connecticut, to Israel, another small and sandy place that would offer solace to the beleaguered Jews of the world. Recently we’d learned that we had a cousin there, Reuben Leibritsky, from Poland, a survivor of the camps, and my father and his brother Nelson sent him money each month.
Technically Bagel Beach was outside the bounds of Woodmont, or at least past the little sign at Woodmont’s western edge that read Leaving Woodmont on the Sound. So was the synagogue and so was the place across from it, Sloppy Joe’s, the hamburger shop all the high school kids gravitated toward in the evenings. But all of it—that world inside the bounds of the sign and that small, particularly Jewish stretch beyond it—was what we knew of and meant by Woodmont.
The coastline’s natural shale formations, often huge and jagged piles of rocks, created boundaries that formed Woodmont’s several and distinct beaches, the popular Anchor Beach, for example, which bordered Crescent Beach then Long Beach. Some rock formations had names, like Lazy Rock, Potato Rock, and Signal Rock, identifiable off the shore of Anchor Beach by its flagpole. Our beach was separated from the others not only by rocks, though, but also by a seawall, too high to climb over, which meant we needed to walk on the roads, rather than along the shore, to get to the others.
Bagel Beach was just a slice of Woodmont, and Woodmont, too, was just a slice—a small mile-and-a-half stretch—of the city of Milford’s coastline. Connecticut’s abundant Irish came there as well, though in our area of Woodmont their homes were set back from the water, in the hills past the Jewish world. And there were “Yankees” there too, my father’s word for Protestants. But of course we didn’t mix. Nor did we mix with the people living in the neighboring shoreline boroughs, as dominated by gentiles as Bagel Beach was by Jews, places like Bayview Beach and Pond Point, populated for the most part by Italians, or Morningside, which was a Protestant place, and as closed to us—or so I’d heard—as if surrounded by a fence.
Yes, we were here, engaging like everybody else in a kind of segregated ethnic tribalism that for us was part necessity, part comfort. But my mother didn’t mean only that when she said, her voice confident, her chest filling with air, Here. She had her own sense of the place, which had to do with the past, with the summers she spent at Woodmont before her marriage. Though my father and Uncle Leo paid the yearly taxes and provided funds for upgrades, for Ada the men’s contributions never changed the fundamental fact of the sisters’ inheritance: the cottage was theirs. They’d grown up in it, they knew it best, they spent more days in it. They could look at the living room radio console and recall countless gatherings beside it to listen to the soap operas of their youth: The Carters of Elm Street, Lorenzo Jones, As the World Turns. They could open the dining room’s sideboard and point at the dishes, knowing which set was for milchidik, which for fleishadik. A given stain on a tablecloth was to them a particular shared memory that the men, the husbands of the weekend, knew nothing about.
It hadn’t changed. To grasp that constancy was the point of roaming, room by room, through the cottage. And once we’d been assured of that indelible sameness, the unpacking could begin. Off went the remaining white sheets covering beds and dressers. Out came the vacuum to gather three seasons’ worth of dust. There was the front porch to be swept clean and the kitchen table and counters to be wiped down. Soon enough, Davy had his second helpless jump on his summer bed, which with the cottage walls so thin he didn’t get away with for more than a few leaps. “Out!” my mother called, and she waited at the bottom of the stairs until Davy reluctantly trudged down them and made his way through the front door, onto our open front porch.
The sisters had yet to change out of their Middletown dresses, their hose, their almost identical brown shoes with practical one-inch heels, when they decided to walk down to the water. The Long Island Sound, too, needed to be seen and felt again. They needed to say hello to it and to hear, in the gentle, unending lapping of waves, a kind of voice they’d heard a million times before.
As I watched them make their way around the Isaacsons’ cottage and onto Bagel Beach I thought how ridiculous they looked, all dressed up like that, their good town shoes sinking into the sand and no doubt filling with it. Standing on our porch as they ambled forth, Davy—then and forever eight years old—was beside me. Howard had already gone off to meet his best Woodmont pal, Mark Fishbaum—the person I’d eventually marry and then divorce, though in 1948 all that was inconceivable. Nina was inside reading. As I stared ahead I noticed Mrs. Isaacson peeking through a back bedroom window that looked out on us. When I waved, she waved back. “Nice to see you, Molly,” she called, not at all uncomfortable with being found out. When Davy then said, “I’m going to build a new sand castle every single day,” I silently nodded. Glancing at the groupings of people on the beach, mothers and children in proper swim attire, many of them waving at the sisters as they made their entrance onto the summer scene, I was embarrassed for them. I was even more so when my mother bent over, grabbed a shoe, then stood straight as she tipped the shoe over, giving it a shake. “I’m going to build forts, too, and maybe I’ll let you hide in one,” Davy added. When I looked his way I noticed Mr. Weinstein two cottages over, one of the old radios he liked to fix set before him on a table on his porch. “And I’m going swimming, even in bad weather.” As Davy continued, my mother returned her shoe to her foot. Then she and Vivie marched on, determinedly, toward the water, though with a space of about two feet or so always between them.
The space made me wonder where my aunt Bec was, why she still hadn’t arrived yet. It was as if with that open air between them Ada and Vivie were holding a place for her, a niche Bec would fill perfectly, if only she were there.
Davy continued talking. My mother and aunt continued walking toward the water’s edge. Mr. Weinstein leaned over and twisted a knob on his radio.
Recently, this present year of 1999, my aunt Bec bequeathed to me her house. I’ll move in fully after the New Year; it seems right to make such a change at the start of a new millennium. But for now, this fall, I’m only making visits, getting to know the place anew, without Bec there. And the process—looking through Bec’s rooms, opening the trickle of mail that still arrives for her, beginning to sort through the contents of certain closets and drawers—has triggered another one, of trying to put the pieces of the summer of 1948 together as best I can. What, exactly, happened to that twelve-year-old girl so confident in her judgments that first day in Woodmont as she stood on the porch, watching? What happened to Davy, tragic as it is, is at least clear. But what happened to the rest of us—the ways our worlds collapsed, the ways we made sure they did—remains for me the mystery.
This morning I wandered through Bec’s home, modeled so much after the cottage, and decorated just as modestly but for a rather fancy Victorian desk, the kind with little drawers and vertical compartments. The desk stands in a corner of the living room. Opening its drawers I felt a pang of guilt, for clearly this was a private spot of Bec’s, the corner nook, the window, and the lovely old desk, its drawers filled with letters, sketchbooks, scraps of paper, some with addresses on them, others with more of Bec’s sketches. In a bottom drawer the sketchbooks were older, the pages more yellowed. In one I found a page dated January 7, 1950, with some writing on it rather than drawing. This was a time, I recalled, when Bec was living with us, after Davy’s death. Singlehandedly, it seemed, she saved our family, pulled us through. In the sketchbook Bec’s handwriting was especially tiny, but I could see it clearly enough. I could die, she’d written. No, no, am already dead.
When Bec finally did arrive at the cottage that Tuesday in 1948, close to dinnertime and in high spirits, it was the roar of her boss’s Buick Roadmaster, the only sound all afternoon louder than the background drone of waves, that first signaled to us that she was near. After Vivie and Ada had returned from the beach and finally changed their clothes, and after the cleaning and unpacking, and after my mother had at last called my father to let him know all was well, we’d gathered on the front porch where, for the most part, we were simply taking in the air. Only Howard was absent.
The Roadmaster was a gleaming red and white sedan, so much fancier than our faded green Dodge with its many rust spots. The year before, Bec’s boss, Tyler McMannus, had also dropped her off, but not in as glorious a vehicle. This day he parked the Roadmaster beside our Dodge and honked a greeting. Then he got out and tipped his hat to us, calling, though not particularly loudly, “Hello, ladies,” to Ada and Vivie as he did. Slowly, because of his slight limp—the remains of a war injury that had brought him home earlier than anticipated from Europe—he walked around the car. Bec sat inside it, waiting, familiar with the routine. We’d seen it before too. When Tyler reached her, he opened the car door and then held Bec’s arm as she stepped out. For a second, he held her gaze.
Bec looked elegant in a short-sleeved red dress, belted in white, with a coordinating white collar and white trim around each sleeve. Oddly, her colors matched the Roadmaster’s perfectly. After turning from Tyler she raced up the porch steps, singing out our names. As she spun around, spewing hellos, her skirt twirled with her. That she’d made the dress was a certainty, for Bec was a master seamstress. In New Haven she worked in Tyler McMannus’s dress shop, and by all accounts its upper-crust clientele were especially fond of the garments Bec designed and sold there. She was so good, in fact, that Tyler gave her eight weeks each summer at the beach with her sisters—whatever it took to keep his most valuable employee happy, he’d explained to us on more than one occasion.
As Bec greeted everyone, Tyler remained by the car and watched. He seemed genuinely pleased for Bec, smiling throughout the welcoming period. Once things quieted down on the porch Tyler joined us and soon stood beside Bec, his fedora in his hands, his suit jacket unbuttoned, the limp that you couldn’t help but notice as he climbed the porch steps no longer so apparent, his near-black hair and gray eyes glinting as a ray of late-afternoon sun landed on him. “Quite a day, yes?” he said as he thrust his hand out to shake Ada’s, then Vivie’s.
When Bec stepped closer to him, she too was caught in the sun’s light and there they stood, two exceptionally well-tailored individuals whose smiles, when they looked at each other the next moment, were almost as bright as the sunshine they momentarily basked in. It would be decades before I understood the extent to which they were in love with each other that summer. In fact by that day Tyler, though still married, had proposed that he and Bec start a life together in New York City, but even as I watched them on the porch, in all the ignorance of twelve years old, it seemed to me that one could only wish to be just like them, so well put together, so well matched.
Though on vacation, Bec still had a little sewing to do while she was at the beach, and on several Fridays she’d have to go back to New Haven for any fittings that couldn’t be delayed until early fall. Because of this she’d brought her Singer, which Tyler awkwardly lugged up the porch steps then carried to Bec’s sunporch. He quietly hummed as he hauled in next her suitcases and her large sewing basket. Tyler granted Davy the privilege of carrying in Bec’s mannequin—Eleanor Roosevelt, we proudly called her—that she couldn’t work without.
Minutes before Tyler left—without fanfare, the only sign of anything between him and Bec his left arm dangling out the car window, extending back—Bec was the one to shoot down the porch steps and whisk from the car one last item. From a hanger flowed a dress, pale yellow with small white flowers on it, covered by a short jacket of the same material.
Once she’d carried it to the porch she held it out to Nina. “Strapless,” Bec explained, pushing the jacket back, revealing the dress. “Made it for you,” she said, excited for Nina. As she thrust it at Nina, Bec added, eyebrows raised, “Could change your life. Dresses do that, you know. They really do.”
By dinnertime the sisters were wearing nearly identical outfits: floppy cotton housedresses. Even Bec. Yes, I saw, dresses could change your life, and so much for the better.
And with the return of their casualness we were most definitely here.
The next day, Wednesday, the sisters rose early for a quick dunk in the Sound then spent the rest of the morning around the kitchen table talking to Mrs. Isaacson, who came by with a freshly baked coffee cake and ten months’ worth of news. She’d brought along her granddaughter Judy, too, who was in her second year of a failing marriage and needing a break from it. Everyone knew it was Mrs. Isaacson’s great hope that Judy would eventually have as loving a marriage as she and Mr. Isaacson had had—“Fifty-two years and still French-kissing,” as she put it—but we could all see that even though Judy was pregnant, there was no real joy in her life. She passed on the cake, endlessly stirred her black coffee, said nothing.
When Mrs. Isaacson was finally through talking, the sisters set off for a walk, starting along the roads between Bagel and Anchor Beach. Even when they turned off the road and scrambled over the rocks that abutted the shoreline at Anchor Beach, slowing to a crawl to do so, they acted like they didn’t know that Davy and I were right behind them, having our own walk, collecting shells and gull feathers and the occasional starfish along the way.
During the afternoon, after lunch and a smoke on her sunporch, Bec began to sew, a party dress, she said, for a Mrs. Arthur Coventry of New Haven. She was the wife of a retired law professor from Yale. A little hoity-toity, like so many of those Yale wives, Bec noted, but nice. Though we couldn’t know it then, as she sat at the Singer that afternoon Bec was contemplating, as she’d been since Tyler had voiced it a week before, his proposal. (“We could be happy in New York. I know that. I believe that, Bec,” he’d said.) The proposal wasn’t for marriage—he was Catholic and couldn’t find it in himself to divorce—but she knew it was for a lifelong commitment all the same.
That day Nina stayed on the porch, reading Darwin. The hefty book was clearly an endless read and summer would be gone, I worried, before she’d come to the beach with me. I was hoping she and I would be close, like we’d been the summers before, and like the sisters were that morning, their eyes flashing signals to each other about the silent Judy as Mrs. Isaacson yakked on, and later, their heads bent toward each other while they chatted during their walk; and even like Howard and his pal Mark Fishbaum, an only child always eager for company, who showed up that first full day for both breakfast and lunch. In the morning Howard sailed with Mark, who had a twelve-foot Sailfish to launch, but after lunch the two parted and Howard set off for Treat’s produce stand on the outskirts of Woodmont where he hoped to get a part-time job. “Noon to four thirty,” he proudly announced that evening as we gathered outside on the porch for supper.
Davy followed Howard’s news with some of his own. Over the summer he’d be working too, he told us. But he didn’t sound as happy as Howard. What he meant was that he expected mail soon from Lucinda Rossetti, who that past year had been in his second-grade class in Middletown. Their teacher had assigned the students a summer project: they would pair up and share in drawing a picture. One of them would draw a portion of it then pass it to the other, and so forth. “She broke the rules,” he complained about his teacher, a woman who, until that moment, it seemed he’d simply adored. “There’s no homework in summer. Everybody knows that.”
“Buddy, there’ll come a day when you actually like that girls send you things,” Howard told him with an assurance born of the fact that Howard rarely went without a girlfriend, though just then he was single.
Nonplussed, Davy had no answer to that.
The next day our first piece of mail in fact arrived, a white envelope that hailed, ominously for Davy, from Middletown. We kids were in the kitchen eating lunch when Bec wandered in, holding the thing.
To Davy’s relief Bec handed the envelope to Nina, who promptly tore it open and read out loud her father’s words: There are so many mysteries to life, Nina. Darwin looked hard, and looked for a long time, and in the end, it seems to me, he figured out one of the biggest of them all. I look forward to talking with you about him—soon enough. “Nice,” she said, folding Leo’s note and tucking it, like a second bookmark, into the thick pages of On the Origin. She nodded before repeating, “Nice.”
“See? Mail’s fun,” she then told Davy. “Ever get any? Just for you?”
“I’ve never gotten a letter,” Davy acknowledged.
Later that afternoon Davy, Nina, and I ran into Sal Baby, known to adults as Sal Luccino, the local Good Humor man—the person who, come Friday of the third week of August, would run his truck over Davy. As we walked on Hillside Avenue toward Sal and his wares we could see that Sal was breaking up a tussle between the Weinstein twins. One of them, Jimmy Weinstein, already had an ice cream bar in hand and despite the tears running down his face had just taken a first bite. The other boy, Arthur Weinstein, had a bloody nose. “If you can stay out of trouble for the next week I’ll give you a free one,” Sal was telling Arthur as he mopped up the blood with a paper napkin. He did this while holding a lit cigar in his left hand. Once we’d arrived at his truck, Sal glanced our way, winked hello, puffed at the cigar, and then resumed his negotiations with Arthur Weinstein. Ten minutes and five bloodied napkins later we at last got our Good Humor bars.
By late Thursday afternoon, after Howard had come home from Treat’s, clouds gathered and my mother stood on the beach, admonishing Howard and Mark, and then begging them, not to go sailing. “Can’t you two play cards?” she asked almost desperately. “Or help Mr. Weinstein over there with his radio?” But sail they did, out past Bagel Beach, over toward Anchor Beach, where they slid past Signal Rock, then past Crescent Beach then Long Beach, and finally they were beyond Woodmont altogether, sailing through the border of West Haven, which for them was uncharted territory, a place of friendly enough coastal waters but unknown depths.
In the photo of Maks and Risel of June 1939 they were sitting at the beach, hand in hand, looking more toward each other than the camera. Earlier that day, following the affixing of mezuzot throughout the cottage, the two had celebrated paying off the mortgage in yet another way. Risel, this time, had the idea. Heavyset and prone to napping, she nevertheless scuttled, breasts and belly jiggling, down to the shore. She was still in her Shabbos dress and her seamed stockings, though she’d taken off her heeled shoes even before the last mezuzah was hung. In her hand were the mortgage papers, rolled and jammed into an empty Coca-Cola bottle, its cap secured with adhesive tape. The tide was out. My grandfather, delighting in the cool but bearable touch of the shallow waters of low tide, the soft ridges of wet sand under his feet, the renewed energy of his typically sedentary wife, followed Risel as she waded out to where the waters were knee-deep. There she stopped, her hem drenched, her stockings ruined, her waist twisted, and with the expertise of a discus thrower she heaved the bottle into the sea. Then she whooped with joy and splashed her husband. But Maks only stood there quietly, a yard or so from Risel, watching the bottle bob as it drifted from them. At last, the bottle gone from sight, he stepped closer to Risel and grabbed the hand that had done the hurling. For some time they stood there, staring at the hazy and distant line of the horizon. Above them gulls flew, as always, and by their legs a jellyfish floated past, barely noticeable as it swayed with the sea’s mixed currents. Time was a strange thing, Maks muttered to Risel, pulling her close. And by that he meant that it seemed impossible they’d been married forty-four years.
Friday morning was a simple enough matter. Howard, who’d been up carousing with Mark Fishbaum the night before, was late taking off to join the morning minyan in Middletown. When he finally pulled the Dodge onto Hillside Avenue to begin his drive to Middletown he thought he was still dreaming, for there was Davy, yawning as he stood roadside at the mailboxes, waiting hours too early for the day’s mail to arrive.
On his hand he wore his favorite puppet, Samson, the boy in a family of puppets we’d named after our beach. Lenny Bagel. Esther Bagel. Linda Bagel. Samson Bagel. Brilliant, we’d thought, to name them so aptly: the Bagels of Bagel Beach.