There was something about Davy’s personality—a touch of silliness, a whole lot of energy, an easy likability—that allowed us to see in him what we wanted to. My father saw that part of himself, the boy so very good at being a shortstop, that was never allowed to be. Howard, in contrast, very often saw someone to protect, perhaps against the father to whom he felt at times so vulnerable. In the same breath, however, Davy could be a way for Howard to buffer himself against Mort. That’s why, perhaps, upon arriving at Woodmont that Friday evening, Howard grabbed Davy, threw him over his shoulder, and carried him, kicking and squealing, outside for a quick pre-dinner game of catch. The baseball gloves and ball were lying in a protected corner of the front porch, always ready for such an occasion. Without even stopping to take off his tie and shoes, Howard grabbed the mitts and ball and led Davy to the beach, where we could see them throwing the ball back and forth, and we could hear the distinctive thump of the hardball hitting the mitt’s leather, and we could even hear Howard’s gentle coaching of Davy—good one, run, get it—whose favorite part of the game was to chase a fly ball, the highest Howard could throw. Had he lived to play the game beyond his childhood, there’s no doubt in my mind that Davy was destined to be an outfielder and not the shortstop of my father’s projected dreams. But such is the way of family: we are what they tell us we are, and part of life’s great struggle, it’s always seemed to me, is to know oneself despite that imposing collective definition.
That effort was perhaps my great task that summer, other than trying to hang out as much as possible with Nina, and to do this I found myself that first week in Woodmont drawn at times to the claw-footed tub in the upstairs bathroom, which I’d recently discovered was a good place to think. The tub dry, my clothes still on, I hurdled the high rim and sank down, just as if I were soaking, but in silence rather than water. And something about that silence, along with the confinement of the tub, got me into a particular frame of mind, one in which it became more than evident that this was uncanny—this life, this existence at all—and what I meant by that was that it seemed so very strange to be me, just me, this silent inner self whom only I actually knew. The outer self, whom the family knew quite well, was but a shell, a quaint cover story, and that week I had only just begun to understand that no amount of living with them, cramped cottage and all, would ever change that fact. She didn’t even have a name, this essence of myself, this non-Molly whom I quickly took to, rather liked, and that Friday, after Howard had taken off with Davy, and in the time we still had before we’d begin our Shabbos meal, squirreled away in the upstairs bathroom with the locked door and the womb-like walls of the tub surrounding me, I managed in just a few quiet minutes to do it, to woo her from the cave of my soul. Hello, I whispered to my near stranger of a self. Hello.
Moments before, upon the men’s arrival that evening, after my father had loosened his tie, my mother, already dressed in a proper skirt and blouse for Shabbos, emerged from the kitchen to bring him a glass of water and told him to “Sit, sit,” to which he answered, “I’ve been sitting already, too much sitting,” and then she, as if she hadn’t heard him, walked back into the kitchen, and he, as if he hadn’t heard himself, sat, in the corner chair in the living room. And that’s how my parents behaved toward each other then, courteous but cool, aware of each other but imperturbably so, as if they inhabited separate spheres and saw each other only from a distance. From what I observed it was hard to imagine them ever being passionate toward each other, hard to imagine that time when Ada was eighteen and Mort was twenty-four, and the attraction they felt for each other was so strong that Vivie was thrown, easily enough, by the wayside.
For Vivie the ordeal—something in hindsight she called her slow march toward freedom, toward a self she never knew she had—began like this.
A week after she’d spotted Ada and Mort hand in hand outside her front door, Vivie had to endure the fact that when Mort finally apologized to her, coming to her home just to do so, he didn’t even hint at the possibility of their resuming their old courtship. It was real, then, she knew: the hand-in-hand business wasn’t just an accident as Ada had tried so hard to convince her, describing over and over again the spill she’d taken just seconds before on their front walkway.
“He was pulling me up,” Ada had insisted. “That’s all. That’s it. I was so embarrassed to fall like that—on my tuches!—but he acted like he didn’t even see.”
But with Mort’s apology Vivie came to know better, came to know that her younger sister was capable of making a lie sound not only convincing but even sweet.
Then Vivie had to endure that first time, several weeks later, when she watched from her bedroom window as Mort approached her front door, rang the bell, and asked—albeit timidly—for Ada. Vivie crept from her bedroom to the top of the stairs where she could hear everything but not be seen. She gasped as Mort and Ada laughed upon meeting again. The laughter was quiet, meant not to be heard, but it was laughter—joy—all the same. And that’s when my aunt decided that her survival, her dignity, depended on her moving out.
She knew of an extra room down the street in the Bloomberg home, where she’d babysat Lorna Bloomberg for so many years. The family was more than happy to offer it and to her relief accepted only the most nominal of pay. “We think of you as family,” Mrs. Bloomberg told her, surprisingly enough. She thought of them as simply the Bloombergs, a couple who’d had a pest of a child late in life, people she didn’t really know.
That first night at the Bloombergs’, late February of 1926, was the first time in my aunt’s life that she’d spent even a night on her own. The Bloombergs’ extra room was a small one on the third floor, a former nanny’s quarters, furnished, though barely so. When she’d arrived there, a Sunday night, she placed her suitcase down at the doorway then took a few steps inside the room and finally sat on its twin bed. For over an hour she stayed there, her coat still on, her hat in her hands, her mind determined to ignore Lorna Bloomberg, then fourteen, who kept peeking in on her, asking her if she needed this or that. More water? An extra blanket? Something to read? To all this Vivie shook her head, and she continued to sit still, frozen, even as she heard Mrs. Bloomberg scold Lorna, telling her to leave “poor Vivie” alone.
“Poor Vivie.” The words resonated with how she felt about herself, a single woman in a room with a single bed, a single pillow, a single dresser, and a single window to glance out of. There was a small night table beside the bed, and on it was a glass filled with water and a dusty vase containing a single artificial red rose. It, too, was dusty.
She’d arrived at the Bloombergs’ at seven. At nine or so the radiators began to clank loudly. At nine thirty the bulb in the lamp beside the bed flickered. Vivie thought the light would go out but it didn’t. She wouldn’t have minded if it had, blacking out the present scene and brightening the one in her mind of a different room, the one she was to have had as Mrs. Morton Leibritsky, a woman who might just work for a time at the store, she’d long figured, but only until the first child came, and then she’d be caught up in the whirlwind of responsibility that was motherhood. Her bedroom, the one she would share for a lifetime with Mort, was to look, with its full-sized bed, its several dressers, its lovely draped curtains and colorful bedding, nothing like the room she now inhabited. At ten o’clock she reached for the extra blanket at the foot of the bed and threw it over her lap. She was still in her coat but, strangely, she was shivering. By eleven, though, she rose to take off her coat and shoes, then she leaned back, placed her head on the pillow, and eventually wiped her eyes dry, flicked off the unsteady lamp, and fell asleep.
Because she was on her own, just a half block from her family but in this new room feeling miles and miles away, and because she’d never returned to Leibritsky’s Department Store once she’d spotted Ada and Mort together that day, Vivie needed a new job. This she acquired promptly through a suggestion from Mr. Bloomberg. She should visit his doctor, he told her, who was out a secretary, and within the week she began working for Dr. Walter Shapiro, one of Middletown’s two Jewish general practitioners.
The job gave her the money to keep going, to board, and it offered something to do. Often those first weeks on her own she reminded herself that the job was a step up from the sales work—just a whole lot of talking—that she’d been doing before. She’d remind herself of that and then she’d remind herself again, because in fact it was so very quiet in Dr. Shapiro’s somber waiting room, with its windows covered by faded blue drapes, its worn carpeting, the few pictures on the walls of foreign landscapes, and the patients who walked in, typically tired and anxious.
Still, the work gave shape to what otherwise would have been entirely unwieldy days, without purpose, with too much time to think. “Poor Vivie,” Mrs. Bloomberg still called her weeks after she’d moved in, and who knew how many others thought of her in the same way, as forlorn as a patient waiting for Dr. Shapiro, as weakened at the core.
Spinster. The very idea of it made her shudder.
The job gave her a different title—Secretary, Gal Friday, Dr. Shapiro’s Trusty Viv. Arriving by nine each morning, she’d get through those early hours by greeting patients and making appointments. In the afternoons she’d pull out the billing. But at some point she’d be interrupted by Tillie Hirschfield, Dr. Shapiro’s nurse, who, just weeks into Vivie’s tenure, couldn’t resist the daily urge to drop her bottom right on Vivie’s desktop and talk, not so much to her as at her. In this way Vivie invariably knew what Tillie Hirschfield would have for dinner that night, was thinking of doing over the weekend, and, most interestingly, what she’d gone through when she suffered both of her divorces. That the patients could hear Tillie as easily as Vivie could didn’t seem to affect her oration. It might even have been the point, Vivie soon concluded. At five she’d leave the office and amble back to the Bloombergs’. “Poor Vivie,” Mrs. Bloomberg would be sure to say, without even realizing it, upon seeing her. “How was work?” she’d then ask, sadly. The phone, with her mother, Risel, calling her, might or might not then ring, and if so, another married woman would say “poor Vivie” at least once. This scenario wasn’t much to come home to, and Vivie walked toward it slowly, breathing deeply as she did, at times gulping in the evening air as if whatever winds and fragrances and warmth or coolness that combined to form it were a prescription from Dr. Shapiro, medicinal, healing.
After some months she began to feel a bit better. It was April then and she trekked toward the Bloombergs’ more slowly than ever, though not because she dreaded being there but because the evening air had become like a friend: fragrant, comfortable, comforting. Once she was midway to the Bloombergs’ when, lost to the wonders of the spring air, she nearly bumped into a young couple, a man with his arm draped over the shoulder of a woman, who in turn had her arm wrapped around the man’s back.
“Excuse me,” the man said.
“Oh,” Vivie muttered, not because of the near collision but because it pained her instantly to see these lovers. Rather than their faces, she focused on their shoes, his and hers. Then, because even that was too much, she focused on something else, the empty porch of the house they were in front of, its mailbox, nailed beside the front door, overflowing.
“Yes, I’m sorry too,” she said, her face still turned from them. Then she dashed away, suddenly racing toward the Bloomberg home, which had never before seemed so much like a haven. After dinner she spent the evening in her room, lying on her back, soothing herself with heavy sighs. She had promised Lorna Bloomberg she’d play cards with her, but when Lorna knocked on her closed door Vivie told her she wasn’t well, she had a stomachache, that tomorrow she’d play with her any game she wanted: rummy, hearts, Old Maid.
Tillie Hirschfield’s remarkable two divorces didn’t mean she was done with men. On the contrary, she was on the prowl, as she put it, searching for Mr. Right. “Two Mr. Wrongs don’t make a Mr. Right,” she quipped one afternoon. Then she added, “After what I’ve been through I deserve my Mr. Right.” This time she was sitting beside Vivie’s desk, not on it, and her voice was lowered, demonstrating a need for discretion that surprised Vivie. It was late spring and the flowery scent of Tillie’s perfume reminded Vivie of the lilacs in bloom along her walk to and from the office.
“Maybe you and me could go out some night,” Tillie proposed to Vivie. “You know, we’d be two ladies having dinner, maybe even having a drink or two.” When Tillie winked, Vivie noticed the beginnings of lines around her eyes. “You never know what might happen. We just might run into a pair of handsome men.”
Tillie nodded and smiled cajolingly.
“I spend my weekends with my sisters,” Vivie lied. “It’s my only time with them.” In fact she spent some of each weekend at home, visiting her parents and one of her sisters, but the other one, who dated Mort Leibritsky, she still couldn’t be around.
“Well, just think about it. You’re not getting any younger.” Tillie rose and broke into a yawn. “God, I’m bushed,” she muttered, as she retreated to the examination area.
Such talk about men and age and, implicitly, about failure—those two divorces that kept Tillie Hirschfield on the prowl—unsettled Vivie. Sadly, she sighed and then scanned the waiting room. Two people were there, a mother, a young woman about Vivie’s age, and her small son, who was pale and couldn’t sit still. The mother struggled to keep the boy seated. She talked to him, read to him, patted his back to calm him. She scolded once or twice. She looked exhausted. Watching them, and still thinking about Tillie, who was soon to turn thirty-five, she’d recently confessed to Vivie in a voice that sounded frightened and grave, a tone, Vivie understood, connected to her increasingly improbable search for Mr. Right, Vivie felt the stirrings of a new insight, something about the hardships of adult life, its awful loneliness, which hit you whether you were married or not; something about marriage itself not being the haven or even the prize she’d always thought. She rose and handed the boy a pad and pencil. “Want to draw a picture?” she asked, kneeling on the floor before him. When he grabbed the items, she patted his head. His mother said to him, “What do you say?” But before the child could thank Vivie she told the mother, “It’s nothing. The least I could do. Doctor should see you in a minute.”
That moment was a turning point for Vivie, who felt more free from then on to rise from her chair behind the reception desk, walk out to the sitting area in the waiting room, and engage a needy patient. Sometimes she brought a person a glass of water. Sometimes a better, more recent magazine. Sometimes she sat there and listened as patients complained about their aches and pains. Often they told her they didn’t know what they’d do without Dr. Shapiro.
He was an unusual physician, she gradually understood, someone who frequently took in patients with unsolvable problems, people other doctors had given up on or considered overly sensitive, the kind who only imagined themselves to be sick. But in Dr. Shapiro’s office, under his uniquely generous care, she watched those weakened souls gain hope, even much-needed color in their cheeks. Soon, a number of them would gain weight on their bones and energy in their step. Not everybody in this category of patients got better, but enough improved that Vivie began to wonder if Dr. Shapiro had a magic formula he passed out behind the closed doors of his examination rooms. She wouldn’t mind seeing him herself, she often thought. But when Tillie Hirschfield told her that when all else failed Dr. Shapiro ordered the daily ingestion of cod liver oil along with more broccoli than you’d ever think to eat, Vivie’s desire for Dr. Shapiro’s special treatment, however helpful it apparently was, quickly waned.
One night in early summer, following a quiet day at the office—like everybody else even the sick were on vacation, Dr. Shapiro had joked—Vivie walked up Main Street to stop at a pharmacy before heading to the Bloombergs’. Because Leibritsky’s Department Store was also at the street’s north end, she’d not taken a step in that direction for months. But the pharmacy wouldn’t take her nearly that far, she reasoned. She passed any number of businesses before she got to the pharmacy, and as she walked she took an interest in them, staring into the window displays of a florist’s shop, a shoe store, a beauty parlor, an Italian food market. She was just passing a five-and-dime store when she spotted a couple sitting on stools at the closed lunch counter. The woman, wearing a blue sleeveless dress, held her arms outstretched toward the man beside her, who had shifted on his stool so that he faced her and not the counter. Whatever he was saying made her laugh. He leaned forward then, into her arms, and kissed the woman.
Vivie slowed her steps, fascinated. At some point, just like the woman through the window, Vivie raised an arm, though only to clutch at her chest. Then she stumbled forward. By the time she arrived at the pharmacy she was blinking back tears, embarrassed when the pharmacist called to her asking if he could help. She was fine, she told him, though as she raced home that night, and for many nights and days to come, she felt the deep pain of it: her loveless life, her dull routine, her bleak future, the one without Mort, the man she’d counted on, had seen that future in, the man who suddenly cropped up in her mind—despite everything, despite how far she thought she’d come—again and again.
Mid-July, while her parents and Bec, along with Ada and Mort, were away at Woodmont, and while Vivie stayed behind in Middletown to hold down the fort, as she put it, at Dr. Shapiro’s, she decided she would go out to dinner one night with Tillie Hirschfield. Why not? She’d saved her money, could afford a little extravagance. They ate at Angelina’s, one of Middletown’s many Italian kitchens. Tillie wore a string of fake pearls around her neck. Vivie wore an old charm bracelet. They talked about this and that, mostly their childhoods. Tillie was from West Hartford. “It’s pretty there,” she said wistfully, as if the place no longer existed.
They didn’t meet any single men. The three other tables were filled by families. “Oh, well,” Tillie had said, early into the evening. “Might as well eat up then.”
And they did. They were delighted with the veal Angelina brought them, along with side bowls of pasta and marinara sauce. Their bellies full, they took a walk afterward, down Main Street, arms linked.
“I bet you’re some sister,” Tillie told her, leaning her head toward Vivie.
“I’m not so sure about that,” Vivie answered, matter-of-fact. But when Tillie began laughing for no reason—the wine at dinner probably gone to her head—Vivie laughed too, because even without the aid of so much alcohol she felt strangely carefree. She’d have to buy herself more meals, and maybe some new stockings, maybe even a new dress. That’s what a working woman could do, she suddenly knew. And that thought made her laugh again, louder.
Early that fall, even before her mother told her about Mort and Ada’s engagement—arriving at Mrs. Bloomberg’s doorstep to do so, sitting with the woman at her kitchen table, the two of them across from “poor Vivie,” as they’d said in unison—she’d heard about it already. A patient of Dr. Shapiro’s had told her by way of congratulating her, assuming she already knew.
What surprised her upon hearing the news was that it didn’t knock her over. She did open her eyes wide. She also gasped, but almost silently. Then she resumed her work. Seated in the waiting room was that same tired mother she’d helped before, a person she now called Frances, and her son, Thomas, and soon Vivie rose, moving away from the patient who had told her the news and toward Frances and Thomas, both of whom obviously wanted her company, the mother for comfort, the child for some kind of new game to play, some kind of treat.
In November there would be a family dinner celebrating the engagement, and Vivie was to come. “You can’t avoid them forever,” her father, Maks, had said firmly, her mother and Bec nodding behind him.
“I’ll come,” Vivie said, simply enough.
The night of the family dinner Vivie was seated at the far end of the table, away from Mort and Ada, even away from Mort’s parents. For starters soup was served but her appetite wasn’t hearty. A light patter of conversation ensued, but Vivie remained silent, listening. Brisket, potatoes, and green beans came next, and while the meal was being eaten she didn’t even attempt to engage in small talk with Bec, who, seated beside her, kept turning Vivie’s way, a caring and constant vigil Vivie knew the whole family assumed was needed.
By dessert the talk focused on the impending wedding and it was Ada who then dominated, telling them what food she’d like at the reception, how the tables at the synagogue were to be arranged, whom she’d like to invite, which tailor she’d already visited to get fitted for a dress. She barely paused between sentences. Her excitement and sense of importance were on grand display, and there was Vivie, quiet at the other end of the table, comprehending what the moment meant to Ada while simultaneously thinking about the upcoming week at work, which patients would be coming on which days, Frances and Thomas again on Monday, a wheezing but lovable Mable Stump on Tuesday, a new patient, a fellow named Leo Cohen, with some kind of chronic cough, on Thursday. She thought of Tillie, too, her sad desperation, and a sense of tenderness for everybody she knew through her work with Dr. Shapiro, the world’s wounded, filled her heart. Ada was blabbing on and on but to Vivie all that talk didn’t really matter.
Until suddenly it did. “You’re not always going to feel this big,” she told Ada, abruptly interrupting her sister’s eager monologue. These were the first words she’d directed Ada’s way since the betrayal and they came out in a voice Vivie didn’t know she had: confident and clear.
The talk in the room stopped.
“What? What did you say?” Ada asked, obviously surprised to hear Vivie address her.
“You’re not always going to feel so big,” Vivie repeated, her voice still full with the truth of her words. She was well aware that everyone was staring at her and that no one looked particularly happy to be doing so.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Ada asked. She held her hand at her collar bone and she tipped back slightly, as if knocked off-kilter by Vivie’s words.
“Now’s the time to be happy,” Vivie answered. “Ada, enjoy your happiness while you have it. That’s all I’m saying. Be happy, Ada. Be happy right now.”
Around her the staring faces looked confused, as did Ada’s. Then Ada nodded, said, “Thanks, I am happy. Very happy,” and in the next moment the monologue of the bride-to-be resumed. Vivie sighed.
Six months after Davy’s death, my aunt recalled her words to my mother that evening so long ago. Back then she’d meant to upset her, to pull her down a peg or two. “Enjoy your happiness while you have it,” she’d told her younger sister, which wasn’t so bad a thing to say, really, but was just bad enough, enough to cause Ada’s flushed face to blanch. As the years progressed, and Vivie married a man she adored, it was obvious to Vivie that Ada’s happiness had in fact shrunk, long before Davy’s death, and her long-ago warning had come to seem like a bit of prescience rather than the bit of hate it really was. By then Vivie no longer felt such hatred, only compassion as she saw Ada’s confused dissatisfaction take root. Ada obviously felt stuck in a rut but was cursed, Vivie could see, with the inability to fully understand it much less pull herself out of it. But after Davy’s death, the idea that she had wanted Ada to suffer—even back then, when such a desire was understandable—haunted Vivie. She wondered if she’d really released all that early hate. “I’m so sad for you,” she told her sister over and over again.
“What’s that?” Ada once responded when Vivie called to say the words yet one more time. “Who’s this?” she then asked, the bewilderment in her voice part and parcel of the tailspin, Vivie knew, of such a severe, unacceptable loss.
“It’s Vivie,” Vivie told her, saying her name slowly, as if it were a foreign word.
“Oh. Vivie,” Ada said, her voice flat.
“Yes, yes, it’s me. I’m so sad for you, Ada. Do you know that I’m sad? Truly and deeply sad?”
“Not as sad as me,” Ada whispered.
“No. Of course not. No one could be as sad as you,” Vivie finally said.
At Mort and Ada’s wedding, a month after the engagement dinner, Vivie kept to herself, standing in a corner where she told herself she could fall quietly if in fact she were to faint, but to her surprise her legs never gave way and her head never felt at all woozy. In another corner an elderly aunt of Mort’s—a woman she’d met once before at the store, a woman now clearly losing her wits—was sitting by herself in a chair, and Vivie dragged over another one to seat herself beside the old woman.
“Let me get you some food,” Vivie told the woman, who nodded.
She brought back herring and a bagel, and some slices of tomato. On another plate she brought the good stuff: wedding cake, rugelach, and grapes.
When it appeared that the woman couldn’t hold a fork steady in her hand, Vivie took the fork and gently fed her. While she did, a relative of the woman walked over, identified the woman as “Old Rose,” patted her head, and walked away. Vivie continued to feed the woman, talking to her as she did, calling her by her name. “Eat up, Rose,” she urged, “we’re at a party.” She wiped her mouth, and, the meal done, held Rose’s hand. All the while, Rose stared ahead, vacantly. But then her mood shifted, something focused, and she turned to Vivie, her eyes comprehending.
“I know you,” Rose told Vivie, and the limp hand inside Vivie’s came alive and gave her hand a squeeze.
Smiling, Vivie said, “I know you too, Rose.” Then she and Rose continued silently watching. By this time Mort and Ada were being lifted in chairs. A crowd danced around them, clapping. Yet louder than their clamor was Ada’s voice, screeching with delight. In her corner with Rose, Vivie nodded her head in time with the music. She noticed that Rose did the same.
“Care to dance?” Vivie asked the woman jokingly.
“Not today,” Rose answered. “Come back tomorrow, won’t you?” Vivie looked her way as Rose continued, confused, “Maybe I’ll buy something from you tomorrow. Yes, I’ll have the money tomorrow…”
In this way Vivie survived her younger sister’s wedding. She was still not speaking to Ada, still stunned by her sister’s old lies. But at least Vivie could move back home now that Ada had moved out.
Bec was still there, finishing high school, that and dating her classmate Milton Goldberg. For some time once Vivie moved back home the days passed uneventfully. She was relieved to be there, though a certain amount of pressure was being put on her, by way of her father, to consider a long-term career. There was always teaching, Maks said. And then there was nursing.
“I’m happy with Dr. Shapiro,” she told her father, her voice once again filled with that confidence that she didn’t quite know how she’d acquired.
At work Frances no longer needed to bring Thomas in. But by then Vivie had made other friends. In particular, she was always eager to see a young woman named Ruth Brintler, who had begun to see Dr. Shapiro for the treatment of significant fatigue. Dr. Shapiro, Vivie learned, was having trouble finding the root cause of her symptom, as were the other doctors Ruth had seen, but Dr. Shapiro insisted she not despair. Yet Ruth was alone in the world, unmarried, without relatives nearby, supporting herself by working in a library, and she was finding that work unbearable under the weight of her exhaustion. Despair was the hardest thing not to feel, she told Vivie once. That’s when Vivie began to cook for Ruth once a week and bring the meal to her home. Ruth lived in an apartment above the Italian grocery on Middletown’s Main Street, and it was there that the two woman dined together each Tuesday evening, not talking so much as listening to the various sounds issuing from the store below. Soon enough Thursdays became another regular night out as Mrs. Bloomberg and Lorna missed Vivie and insisted she come at least once weekly to dine with them. They wanted to know everything, they told her, as if when she left their home Vivie’s life had taken on an adventurous edge they could only imagine. Mrs. Bloomberg dropped the “poor” and now simply greeted her as “Vivie.”
A year passed this way, with work, her regular Tuesday and Thursday evening engagements, a few nights out with Tillie Hirschfield, and several awkward Shabbos meals at home with the newlyweds there, Ada still puffed up with the self-importance of being a new bride. The first Passover seder was no different—there was Ada, glowing and gabbing, which by this time only made Vivie feel tired. But the second seder redeemed the first. Vivie was invited that year to Dr. Shapiro’s house, along with Tillie, and there, seated at Dr. Shapiro’s dining table, interested to see him wearing a suit and yarmulke rather than his white doctor’s coat, delighted to see him feign shyness when his wife, Penny, complimented his recent haircut, thrilled when he began the service not by lighting candles but by acknowledging her and Tillie as his second family, Vivie found herself stirred more deeply than usual by Dr. Shapiro’s warmth and glad to have broadened her life such that it now was touched by what she thought of as the special grace of his.
The day that Bec announced her engagement to Milton Goldberg, in March of 1928, Vivie might have thought her own life was as past as winter. She might have thought that, the newfound fullness contracting in an instant, but the evening before she’d had an encounter that left her feeling more hopeful than she’d been in a long time. Work finished, she’d gone once again up Main Street to the pharmacy. She was about to turn in to it when she saw ahead of her a young couple walking hand in hand. They weren’t talking but wore contented looks. Minutes later, while staring at bars of soap, Vivie realized that nothing about seeing the couple had caused her to trip or lose her breath. For all she knew, she’d been walking past couples for some time and not even noticing them. And so the next day, with Bec’s news, she was determined not to lose the ground she’d apparently gained. “I’m happy for you,” she told her sister, her tone matter-of-fact. Dutifully, she leaned toward Bec to embrace her. But a moment later she pulled her sister close. “I’m so happy for you,” she repeated. “Really, Bec, I am.”
In the fall of 1928, some six months after Bec’s engagement, Vivie began to take an interest in Leo Cohen, a thin, already balding fellow, one of the patients with chronic problems. A touch of headache, a bit of a cough, weakness in the knees—these were the ailments, always a little vague, of Leo Cohen. He seemed embarrassed to see her whenever he came in, once every other month or so, never speaking to her but merely nodding her way then quickly seating himself in the farthest corner of the waiting room, where a lamp set there made for especially good reading of the book he invariably came in with.
It seemed important reading, she quickly noticed. She’d caught a title once, The Interpretation of Dreams. Her own dreams were a messy business—trains rushing past her, angry dogs chasing at her heels, one in which her perfectly buttoned dress inexplicably fell off her shoulders—dreams so uncomfortable she’d thought only to forget them rather than record them for interpretation. She’d not heard of the book’s author but she assumed from the solemn look on Leo Cohen’s face as he read it that the author was of some note. And she assumed, too, because Leo Cohen always came in with a book as seriously titled as that, that he was a deeply thoughtful man, perhaps even a professor, someone with an office in one of those imposing brownstones that marked the Wesleyan University campus on High Street.
As much as Vivie noticed Leo Cohen he seemed determined to slip in and out unseen. Finally, one day in March of 1929—Vivie was twenty-five by then—she was able to strike up a conversation with him. A flu had hit the community and the waiting room was unusually full; Leo had to sit by her desk rather than in the far corner. And, oddly, he’d not brought a book.
“Here,” Vivie told him, offering him the National Geographic.
Once he’d finished, handing the magazine back, she questioned him about what he’d just found so interesting. Seville, Spain, he said. He described the elaborate processions he’d just read about during Seville’s springtime Holy Week and the equally elaborate fairs held in the weeks after. He suggested she look at a photograph of women dressed in the flamenco style, leaning Vivie’s way for the first time to do so. Then she asked him a few more questions, not about Seville but about him. No, he said, he didn’t work at Wesleyan, though he’d heard of the place; no, he had no wife and kids; and no, he was not originally from Middletown.
“Born and raised in Bridgeport,” he said, rising for his examination.
They didn’t converse the next few times he came to the office but he did make a point of saying hello to her when he arrived and good-bye to her when he left. “Good-bye, Mr. Cohen,” she’d respond. “You have a good day now. And feel well.”
June 1929 and Leo Cohen walked in the office on a Friday without an appointment. He had a small bouquet of daisies in one hand and no book.
“Mr. Cohen?” Vivie asked, confused. “Did I forget to put you on my schedule?” She flipped a few pages of her appointment book.
He cleared his throat. “I didn’t come for that.” Then he offered her the daisies. “I came to ask you to dinner,” he whispered. Just as tentatively, he suggested the next Saturday night.
And so she had a date. Just like that: out of the blue. And with such a thoughtful man, she mused, though he was awfully quiet. On her way home she stopped by the Bloombergs’ to run the whole thing past Mrs. Bloomberg. Later she’d tell her mother and Bec. Over tea, Mrs. Bloomberg and Lorna leaned in for the details. The fact that Leo Cohen could hardly get the words out was the best part of all, even better than the daisies.
“I wouldn’t tell Tillie,” Mrs. Bloomberg advised Vivie as she rose to go.
“Poor Tillie,” Vivie said.
“Poor Tillie,” Mrs. Bloomberg, nodding, agreed.
Over the next months, during which Leo Cohen stopped by Dr. Shapiro’s office toward the day’s end with increasing frequency, offering to walk Vivie home, occasionally taking her out to dinner, Vivie gradually learned that she was wrong about everything. Leo Cohen wasn’t even close to being a professor; he was a baker’s assistant, rising at four thirty each morning to get the dough started. And not only did Leo Cohen lack a college education, he even lacked a high school one. He’d been pulled out of school at fourteen, he explained, the poverty in his family requiring him to work. This he’d done at an arms factory near Bridgeport, and because of the lead involved, his health had been off ever since. Dr. Shapiro charged him next to nothing, he added, to which Vivie responded with that assurance that seemed to bubble up more and more, “He does that a lot. Don’t you feel bad about anything.”
This information took a long time to pull from Leo Cohen, who, just when Vivie thought things were steady between them, would sometimes stop coming by to walk her home; weeks would pass without a word, and then Vivie would confront a mountain of self-doubt. Had she made the whole thing up? Was she that desperate? And if so, how come she didn’t even know this much about herself. But then he’d return, shy as ever, and she’d get the sense that his fear was even greater than her own. She’d have to crack his shell all over again. Questions about whatever book he was reading could get him going, even animate him, but he remained reticent on the subject of himself. “Not much to tell,” he told her on more than one occasion. But by the time he said this Vivie knew enough to find his story a moving one; she felt sorry for the child wild with curiosity who couldn’t finish his schooling and inspired by the personal drive he showed to overcome that limitation. The books all came from the public library, which he visited weekly, as he’d been doing since he was a kid. Crushed to have been pulled from school, he’d heeded his father’s advice to use the library, where books were both bountiful and free. “That was my father’s best idea,” Leo said, his face brightening with the memory.
He proposed to her on one knee, the traditional way, on a drizzly evening in May. They’d gone walking after a dinner out, and were standing outside her home, under an oak tree at the yard’s edge. When he rose from kneeling, a wet patch marked the knee of one pant leg, something she could see even in the dimness of the fading evening light. He was thin as ever, and a street lamp gleamed on his balding head. The truth was, he didn’t look so good. But she’d said yes and he was smiling as she’d never seen him smile before.
“Are you sure?” Maks asked her later that night after Leo had gone, after the news had been delivered to her parents and Bec. “He just doesn’t seem like, you know, much of anything,” to which Vivie answered, firmly, swiftly, “He seems like a whole lot to me.”
At twenty-six, then, Vivie was finally married, the second Syrkin sister to do so. Bec had been engaged the whole time during Vivie’s courtship with Leo, but Bec was waiting for Milton Goldberg to finish college. And so Vivie left a sister behind at home when she moved with her husband into a tiny apartment over a fabric store on Middletown’s Washington Street, an apartment the same size as Ruth Brintler’s. Ruth had passed away the year before, a loss that broke Vivie’s heart more deeply than she’d anticipated. Still, that first year of marriage started well enough with Mort offering Leo a better job right off the bat at Leibritsky’s Department Store, but sometimes Leo felt good and sometimes he didn’t, which meant Vivie would cook up a soup, feed him dinner in bed. And because of Leo’s fragile health she kept her job with Dr. Shapiro, unlike Ada, who stayed home while Mort worked. Sometimes, too, Leo complained about the job, particularly about Mort’s younger brother Nelson, who had an enviable higher education. “Why do the goods always go to the undeserving?” Leo would say about Nelson, whom he faulted for not honoring the value of his schooling by reading even one additional book. And it was lonely, too, Leo griped on occasion, all day on that Leibritsky’s sales floor, a reader among nonreaders. Could make a person feel invisible since no one ever talked to you about the things on your mind, the things that mattered most. But none of Leo’s complaints, physical or emotional, bothered Vivie, as she came into the arrangement well aware that marriage wasn’t a picnic. She knew, too, that it wasn’t a wall protecting you from life’s more difficult blows. Marriage wasn’t anything, really, she reasoned contentedly enough, just a way to live, a way to love someone else. And most folks find that out, sooner or later. Yes, my aunt concluded early on, even someone like her sister Ada, whom she could still hear screeching with unabashed delight on her wedding day, and who’d carried an unthinking air of superiority since the whole thing happened, and who by then had topped matters off with a first child—a boy, no less—would eventually know that.
But that was lifetimes ago. Early July of 1948, our first weekend in Woodmont, two days of clouds, humidity, winds, but no rain; of the ocean swelling and retracting with more force than usual; of intense games of rummy played on the porch (that would be Bec, Vivie, Ada, Davy, and me); of Leo and Nina reading side by side on the sands of Bagel Beach under a large but, because of the clouds, mostly unnecessary beach umbrella (but at least Nina was actually at the beach, I thought); and of Howard dragging himself about while our father continued to punish him for breaking his word about joining the morning minyan by ignoring him and favoring Davy, choosing him as his fishing partner when the clouds finally broke early Sunday afternoon. The sisters were mostly in tending mode—to husbands, meals, children—and whatever echoes Vivie once heard of a younger, screeching Ada had long ago ceased. Time had passed. You could see that most clearly in the way that, once the men packed the car and drove off Sunday evening, my mother, dropping her waving hand, turning from Hillside Avenue back toward the cottage, did so with a look of unbridled, albeit unknowing, relief.
Howard, too, was relieved. But the weekend had affected him, and even after the men left, Howard continued to drag about. Rather than head off for a Sunday evening with his pal Mark Fishbaum he stayed home with us. He was tired, he said, when he phoned Mark. He added that he ought not to have stayed up so late with Mark the previous Thursday evening; the next morning he’d overslept. He might as well have murdered someone, he complained.
The men had been gone for less than an hour when Howard and Nina had their first real fight of the summer. It began with my asking Nina if I could try on the dress Bec had sewn for her. Nina and I were in her parents’ room, which was where we hung whatever summer clothes we needed to hang.
“Come on,” I urged Nina. “Won’t you even try it?” I leaned into the closet, unable to take my eyes from the dress, despite the fact that I’d peeked at it every day that week. The yellow fabric was a soothing pale shade, the cream-colored flowers running across it summery and delicate. The jacket had sleeves that went just past the elbow, an obvious and perfect length. It seemed incredible that after a whole week Nina still hadn’t tried on the dress.
“I can’t see myself in it,” Nina said, not without remorse. “It’s not me.”
“Then I’m going to wear it,” I told her, whisking the dress from the closet.
“It’s too big,” she argued. “You’re a twig.”
“Can’t I try it? I just want to see.” I dangled the dress, still on its hanger, before her.
“All right, Molly. Don’t beg. It’s just a stupid dress,” she said.
I wriggled out of my shorts and top. Seeing me in my bra, which was new and barely needed, Nina smiled, a small turnup of the mouth, the very same smile, more plaintive than cheerful, that my mother had offered when she’d taken me just months before to get fitted.
The dress on, I asked Nina to zip the back. But even the secured zipper didn’t prevent the dress from sliding down my frame, its top section settling in waves at my waist.
“Told you. Too big,” Nina said, though she didn’t laugh. She simply took me in, her neutrality a kind of indifference.
“Hey,” Howard then said, surprising us. He stood in the doorway. I grabbed the dress, yanked it high, and clutched it like a towel.
“Where’d you come from?” I asked, embarrassed.
“I was just in my room,” he answered. “I’m not trying to sneak up on you.” He glanced behind him as if to prove he’d been nearby.
“Don’t you know to knock?” I shrieked.
“Don’t blame me,” Howard said, pointing at the room’s open door. “Besides, Molly,” he continued, leaning my way, “there’s not really much to see.” He took a few steps toward me.
“Don’t you dare,” I said, leaping back and landing beside Nina, on her parents’ bed. Howard, I knew, might pull at the dress. In the right mood, he was just that kind of brother.
“Hey, squirt,” Howard said, seemingly surprised by my reaction, “you know I wouldn’t do that.” Despite his words, when he took another step forward Nina and I sat up straighter, even more on guard.
“Relax,” Howard said, staring at us. “Molly, I’m not going to touch that stupid dress.”
“Not stupid,” Nina remarked, though in fact she’d said the same thing just a moment ago.
She and I glanced at each other with suspicion as Howard repeated, “I’m not going to pull it off.”
He lunged forward then, onto the bed. We screamed.
“You dumb girls,” he muttered as he settled himself behind us where he could lie prone. “You dumb girls have it so easy.”
The weekend with our father ignoring him had clearly taken its toll, as did, I figured, Howard’s business as the eldest son, the child required to bear the most responsibilities.
That may have been what he was referring to, but that’s not how he’d put things.
“Dumb? Easy?” Nina twisted at the waist to confront him. “Honestly, Howard, sometimes I think you don’t know anything. Or see anything. Or hear anything. What’s easy, Howard, is that you’re dumb.”
Howard wasn’t trying to anger us, I could see, but rather attempting with this visit to soothe himself. But his words were poorly chosen and just his presence set Nina on edge. Though I’d witnessed their wrangling before, the rancor between Howard and Nina, a visceral thing, always surprised me when it flared. As Nina challenged Howard she crossed her arms over her chest as if the dress exposed her rather than me, as if Howard were still pointing at her as he had the day of our arrival and commenting on her “bazooms.”
Howard rose, rolled past us, and took to the floor. “I know something, Nina,” he said, standing before us. He nodded at me in the dress then thrust his chest out, clearly implying breasts. Holding that posture, he strutted about the room. “Too big,” he teased again and again.
“You’re disgusting,” Nina yelled. “Stop it.” When he didn’t she added, alluding to his many past romances, “I can’t believe you’ve ever had a girlfriend.”
Howard sighed, almost happily. “Ah, you know I don’t mean it,” he told Nina a moment later, with particular kindness. And there it was: the charm that generated the girlfriends. In this instance it worked again, even on Nina in all her anxiety.
She was just about to relax her folded arms when Howard, pursing his lips, made a series of loud smacking noises.
“Disgusting!” she said.
“Think I don’t know anything?” Howard continued. “Well here’s something everyone knows: Nina’s never been kissed!”
Seeing the depth of the blush spreading on Nina’s face and neck, Howard pushed further. He pursed his lips again and the ugly smacking sounds followed. He finished his performance saying, “Kissing’s fun, Nina. Fun. Don’t you wish you knew about that?”
Then he left, slamming his bedroom door once he reached it. Through the wall we heard him complain, as he had before, “You dumb girls have it easy!”
Moaning, Nina fell back on the bed. As I stepped out of the dress and rehung it I could see she was thinking something, not speaking but sporadically kicking her feet, still upset.
Once I’d changed into my own clothes I joined her on the bed, laying my head on a pillow beside hers. “I guess it’s too big,” I said of the dress, sighing with resignation.
“What’d you think?” Nina said, irked suddenly with me.
“I thought maybe it would fit,” I answered.
“And then what? I’d let you wear it? Just like that?”
“I don’t know. I thought it might be fun to wear.”
“Well now you know it isn’t,” Nina concluded. After another bout of kicking her feet, she added, “Besides, Molly, what do you know of fun?”
That evening we ate dinner in near silence, the sisters seated in the chairs on the porch, we kids spread out on the steps. Howard ate at one end, Nina the other. Davy, who’d been fishing all afternoon with our father, was exhausted and irritable, not quite liking the egg salad, or the half-sour pickles. When my mother asked if he’d rather have chicken salad, he squawked senselessly in response, a weak imitation of gulls, which caused my mother to roll her eyes then sit herself down beside him, pulling him close. “Eat,” she urged, but Davy stopped eating to rest his head in her lap. “Howard, could you carry him upstairs?” Ada then asked.
Later, I heard her talking to Howard. They were back on the porch steps, where Howard had returned after dinner. Over the water, the sun, sinking lower, neared the horizon line.
“It’s my fault,” she told him. “I should have given you a curfew. I shouldn’t have left you boys to your own devices. Live and learn.” She wrapped an arm over his shoulder.
“It’s not your fault,” Howard answered. “I’m eighteen, for God’s sake.”
“Eighteen,” Ada repeated. “Lord knows I made one hell of a decision when I was eighteen. And that’s how come, soon enough, I got you.” She laughed, which caused Howard to nod then finally smile.
While Howard and my mother talked on the porch steps, Vivie sat in silence at the table with Nina. The two sipped tea. “Walk with me?” I heard Vivie cautiously ask Nina.
They left the cottage and headed toward Hillside Avenue. I rose from the living room couch to watch them go. Nina walked with her arms crossed over her chest, as coiled as when Howard had come into the bedroom. But with a tug, Vivie linked arms with Nina. They headed east, toward Sloppy Joe’s and the Villa Rosa, and past that, toward the evening crowd at Anchor Beach. Minutes later, I knew, they’d turn onto Beach Avenue and arrive at the Anchor, where, arms still linked, standing before Sal’s Good Humor truck, they’d confer, mother to daughter, daughter to mother, as they decided which treat to share.
Later, Howard, Ada, Nina, and Vivie found themselves by chance in our cottage’s kitchen. By then a kind of truce had descended between Howard and Nina, each of them having been successfully consoled by their respective mothers, who, backs against the new washer, seemed pleased to be standing beside each other. But for that curious space, a body’s width, between them, you’d think that all was truly and finally well.