Those weeks before Davy’s death in 1948 we relaxed in Woodmont even more than in previous years. Indeed, our whole Jewish neighborhood was relaxed, the recent news of Israel’s independence—life, as we saw it, birthed from the graves of six million—filling our lungs with an easier air. By summertime the conflict in the Middle East had lessened some, and the hopefulness that saturated Woodmont, that had brought so many Jewish families back to the shore after staying clear of the place during the war years, was undeniable. You could hear it in the optimistic tone of conversations. You could see it, too, in the amiable, untroubled way people walked each evening, back and forth, the length of Woodmont—from Hillside and Merwin avenues to the west end of Beach Avenue, and once there all the way to its east end—whistling, chatting, calling out hello.
By the end of our first month at the beach, Ada, Vivie, and Bec were practically carefree, or so it seemed by the way they let their duties slide, particularly the pre-Shabbos housecleaning that normally began first thing every Friday morning but that summer had incrementally been pushed back later and later. The last Friday in July, late afternoon, and the sisters were just beginning to get the house together before the men arrived from Middletown. Before that Bec had taken an especially long walk, her Friday claustrophobia setting in just after breakfast rather than after lunch. At the same time Ada and Vivie were on Mrs. Isaacson’s porch, chatting and sipping coffee, Mrs. Isaacson especially talkative about her granddaughter Judy, who was upstairs, as she was most mornings, still in bed. “Bad hormones,” Mrs. Isaacson, sighing, concluded about Judy. But then Judy appeared, looking unexpectedly chipper in a short red bathrobe and bare feet, and the women sat her down, fed her slices of peaches, combed and braided her hair, and generally fussed so much that Judy, for the first time that summer, smiled. “Do I look pretty?” she asked, touching her hair, and then she smiled again when the word “yes” came rushing at her from so many sources. She even agreed to come to the beach, at least for a spell, and, post-lunch, the women did just that, passing the time by playing rounds of bridge, reading magazines, and finally napping.
The afternoon peaked and ebbed without anyone taking notice. By four thirty, though, Ada was in the dining room, her hair unkempt, her cheeks red from either sunburn or adrenaline, and as she grabbed the better china from the dining room cabinet and practically threw it at me to set on the dining table she muttered, “Shnel, shnel,” reverting in her haste to the Yiddish of her mother. She was saying quick, quick, but even these words, normally of warning, were spoken with a playful edge as if our last-minute preparations were a kind of fun prank, something, if we timed it just right, we’d in fact get away with. In the kitchen, Vivie, Bec, and Nina were rinsing and chopping away, while upstairs Howard, once he’d arrived home from Treat’s, was hastily vacuuming a week’s worth of sand. Davy, who was not participating in the preparations but rather watching them, transfixed, as he sat at the head of the dining table, was finally summoned to race to the nearby bakery for the loaves of challah that nobody that morning had been in the mood to bake. Davy had just returned and handed the bread to my mother when the familiar clank of our Dodge coming to a stop caused all of us to stop abruptly as well. But the pause was fleeting. In the next seconds the challahs were set down and covered on the table, the vacuum cleaner was shoved into an upstairs closet where it didn’t belong, and the four burners of the gas stove were cranked up until small bursts of flames emerged from each one.
When Mort walked through the back door of the cottage and into the kitchen, he had no idea how quickly it had emptied of us just a moment before. Instead he saw the usual worn pots of this and that going on the burners, and the smell of dinner cooking was a familiar one. And he found the empty dining room, its table neatly enough set, looking as it always did. He might very well have found everything to be in order had Davy not called from upstairs, where we were all frantically changing clothes, “We almost forgot!”
“Forgot what?” Mort yelled back.
“Shabbos,” Davy answered, laughing.
A skirmish in the boys’ room sounded through the walls, and from Davy’s muffled squeals it appeared plain that Howard was smothering his face with a pillow.
My father, his steps heavy, began to climb the stairs.
“What’s going on?” he asked from the hallway. From behind shut doors no one answered. In the back bedroom Nina and I had already managed to change into the summer dresses we wore each Sabbath, and we were passing a hairbrush back and forth. Through the wall I could hear Howard once again muffling Davy, who was trying to tell Howard to cut it out. “You cut it out,” was Howard’s clearer reply.
Mort knocked on a door and in the next moment Ada was in the hallway explaining that everyone had taken a long nap that afternoon, the whole clan had fallen right to sleep—“Poof! Out just like that!” she claimed—but we’d wakened and now everything was as usual, she insisted, just a tiny bit late. She laughed, and then laughed again more determinedly. With that she must have convinced my father that nothing odd was up because I could hear him trail her down the stairs, and within seconds a familiar clanking from the kitchen meant that she was at it—checking the food, busying herself—and that Mort, satisfied that all was as it should be, had already landed in the living room, where, until dinner was served, he’d claimed a corner chair.
An hour or so later we ate our Shabbos meal. After the blessings, my father read to us his most recent letter from our cousin Reuben Leibritsky, who was living in Israel but was not particularly happy there. Israel! Reuben had written. I hear it, cousin. I hear the word and how it’s spoken. Israel! But I have to tell you, no matter how much I hear it, I still don’t know where I am. Everybody expected my father to follow the reading of the letter with a lecture about our Jewish obligations, or our luck, but Mort was silenced by his cousin’s anguished sense of displacement. “Let’s keep Reuben in our hearts tonight,” was all Mort said.
The next morning the men and boys went off to shul while we women and girls had a Saturday morning ritual of our own, sipping coffee and cocoa on the porch. That morning there was an especially deep tranquility among us, as if the arrival of the men the evening before and the rushed preparations for Shabbos and the long dinner that followed had been some kind of storm we’d managed to survive and we were now in the calm of an aftermath. Not that the men had done anything alarming. They’d merely arrived. But their very presence shifted the way of things so much it was as if we didn’t see each other while they were there. And so our gathering on the porch that Saturday morning was a time of reconnection. We didn’t talk. But even the silent gesture of looking at each other was a means of communication, and essential, it seemed, to our regaining a sense of presence. Even Nina and Vivie, whose relationship with Leo was more balanced than my mother’s and mine with Mort, required this composed time, this all-female Sabbath breather.
We were doing just that—breathing on the porch, our hot drinks long ago consumed—when we heard the men’s voices only yards away.
My mother jumped up first. “Tuna salad,” she said, before she rushed inside and, as instantly as if by magic, disappeared.
Our parents were going out that night, Saturday, post-Shabbos, to a fund-raiser for Israel at the Hebrew Congregation of Woodmont’s new social hall. They were going dancing, and the cost of the event’s tickets was their donation. Vivie and Leo were going too. The Isaacsons were going, as were the Radnicks and Weinsteins, though according to Mrs. Weinstein, Mr. Weinstein would have preferred to work on his latest radio like it was any old night. In fact, all the Jews of Woodmont of a certain age were going—all the grownups, it seemed, except Mrs. Isaacson’s granddaughter Judy, who preferred to stay home alone, and Bec, who preferred to stay with us kids, she said. So that evening she stood on the porch just like Nina, Davy, and I did, waving to the departing couples, the women bejeweled and perfumed and wobbling in heels they hadn’t worn all summer. But as soon as the couples were gone, Bec told us she really did feel like going out. Just not to the dance. Instead she felt like taking a walk. But first she had to make a phone call. “Yes … yes … now,” she whispered into the phone. After that she brushed her hair and restyled it, slathered on some lipstick, and then told me and Nina to watch Davy and to be good girls. “I might be a while,” she said.
Howard had already gone out for the evening, with Mark Fishbaum, we assumed. But it turned out we were wrong. After Bec left, Nina, Davy, and I took our own walk, to Anchor Beach, where we each bought a treat from Sal. Though the crowd at Anchor Beach was mixed, as Jews we could feel good there, safe, and we stayed, as we so often did, climbing atop a massive spread of rock to eat our treats. For a time we watched Arthur Weinstein race his twin, Jimmy, to Sal’s truck, but soon Davy drew our attention away from the antics of the Weinstein brothers. Pointing in the opposite direction, Davy had his eye on Howard, walking at some distance with his hands in his pockets, away from the Anchor crowd, until he finally stopped, settling on the sand behind a smaller patch of rock. To our surprise Megan O’Donnell followed him, lagging by ten yards or so, but once seated she leaned back on the same shale boulder that Howard was sitting against. They were clearly trying to hide, and for the most part their shared rock concealed them, but from our elevated position we could see them well enough. They were looking straight ahead, at the ocean or perhaps at the horizon line, which grew fuzzy in the distance as the day’s light dimmed.
“Shush,” Nina told Davy, yanking his arm down and then wrapping her arm around his shoulders. “Let’s spy on them,” she whispered.
For a time we watched as Howard and Megan did absolutely nothing. They stared ahead. Howard crossed his arms over his chest at one point then uncrossed them. Megan swatted at what must have been a bug. He finally said something to her, we saw, because she nodded, turning to him at last.
“They’re talking,” Nina reported, stating the obvious but voicing it with curiosity, as if the two were from such foreign worlds you’d think they didn’t share a common language.
“Who is she?” Davy asked.
“She’s the girl from Treat’s checkout stand,” I told him, having recalled seeing her—those frizzy strawberry-blond bangs—from our trip to Treat’s the other week.
“Name’s Megan,” Nina asserted. “We had a good talk that day. Remember?” She looked at me briefly, only to nod and see me nod back, and then she continued to stare at Howard and Megan.
Howard began gesturing in a way that suggested he was telling Megan a story. He also turned more her way, which put his back to us. The gestures continued for some time while Megan O’Donnell sat with her legs pressed to her chest, her body still except when she raised a hand to cover her mouth in what was apparently a laugh.
“How in the world could she think he’s funny?” Nina remarked.
“Howard’s very funny,” Davy said, surprised.
Nina leaned Davy’s way, gently bumping her shoulder against his. “Yeah, what funny thing has he done to you lately?” Her tone was consciously gentle, a way to keep Davy invested in the scene before them.
“I don’t know.” Davy swallowed a final bite of his ice cream. “Just is.”
“Molly, has Howard done anything funny lately?” Nina asked.
“He wakes up every morning with his hair sticking straight up. That’s funny,” I offered.
“Very funny,” Davy agreed.
Howard was still gesturing. Nina was running out of things to say to keep Davy still—Howard’s looks in the morning, it turned out, weren’t all that funny—but she clearly wanted to keep us there on the rocks.
Nina once again wrapped her arm over Davy’s shoulder and he leaned her way, allowing himself to be snuggled. I was no longer watching the two against the boulder but rather was watching Nina, who, despite the warmth she projected toward Davy, was otherwise sitting with her back straight, alarmed. When Howard leaned Megan’s way and put his arm around her, Nina groaned, as if in pain.
“What’s he think he’s doing?” she said, more to herself than to us. She turned away from Howard and Megan, toward the fading horizon line.
“He kissed her!” I said. “Nina, look!”
Though Nina snapped her head back, the kiss was over. And in the second that passed there wasn’t even a trace of its occurrence. Howard and Megan were sitting back, not touching, speaking, or even looking at each other. They simply faced the water. It seemed to me they might as well have been strangers. Or two people who simply couldn’t stand each other but were somehow stuck together, backs glued to that particular mound of shale.
“That’s pretty daring,” Nina declared, despite missing the moment. I knew she referred not so much to Howard kissing a girl—he’d already kissed lots of them—as to Howard’s kissing that girl, one he wasn’t supposed to kiss.
“It’s a free country,” I said, though not with complete conviction.
“Not that free, Molly,” Nina countered, a response that affirmed my doubts.
“Can we go now?” Davy asked, as uninterested in Howard as I’d ever seen him. Davy rose and began nimbly hopping, not rock to rock so much as ledge to ledge, rushing, it seemed, to leave Howard, Megan, and that kiss behind.
Nina and I slowly followed Davy’s lead, off the rocks and back to Beach Avenue, and finally back to our cottage.
The sun had fully set. We were sitting on the porch steps, watching for the occasional lightning bug to flicker before our eyes, and waiting for our parents to return from the dance, or for Bec to return from her walk, or even for Howard to return from his not-so-secret rendezvous, when Nina whispered into the darkness, “It isn’t fair. He always gets the girl, always.”
“He’s charming,” I explained, my answer matter-of-fact. “He got it from our mother.”
“Damn Aunt Ada,” Nina said, sighing. “Did you ever hear the story of what she did to my mother?”
Of course I had. The story even had a name: “Poor Vivie.” I’d heard it more than once—but never from my mother.
Several lightning bugs lit up simultaneously and we three cried out, momentarily startled. Davy grabbed at the air but didn’t catch any.
Soon enough we were back to darkness.
“I think you’re charming,” I said, speaking into the night.
“Oh, Molly. You really think that helps?” Nina said.
The next morning at breakfast all the news was that my parents and aunt and uncle had danced like mad. Had Leo, so frail and cerebral, really danced? we asked. Even Nina couldn’t see it, but Vivie assured us that indeed he had. Vivie, clearly uplifted by the fun of the night before, had made oatmeal, which she urged us to garnish not just with sugar but with a mix of cinnamon and sugar, and we could add raisins and dried apricots too if we liked. “Try something new,” she said. She’d also made cinnamon-spiced muffins. “Get ’em while they’re hot,” she told us, in the charged voice of a saleslady, an odd tone for her. She uttered the phrase again as she set another platter of the muffins on the table in the dining room where my father and Leo ate, our “kids’ table” too crowded for them.
Howard finally came downstairs. Oddly, this Sunday he split his time between the kitchen table, where he ate a bowl of oatmeal, and the men’s table, where he devoured three muffins. Upon leaving us for the dining room he announced, “I’m a wandering Jew,” and then he wandered from one room to the next.
“Don’t go too far,” Nina called, “or you’ll find yourself in trouble.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Howard asked. He’d returned to the doorway between the rooms.
“Just that you’d better watch it,” Nina said. She smirked as she stirred her oatmeal. “We know something, Howard.”
Howard laughed. When the sisters weren’t looking, he pursed his lips as if to kiss. “All that reading, Nina,” he taunted, “and you don’t know a thing.”
“Howard, I heard that,” Vivie interjected sternly.
“Doesn’t matter,” Nina said. She smiled at her mother then glared at Howard. “I really do know something,” she told him. “Don’t push me, Howard. I know something big,” she said.
That weekend, my father had brought to Woodmont the next installment of the picture Davy and Lucinda Rossetti were drawing together. Rather than mail it again, Mrs. Rossetti had dropped the drawing off at the store. But by then the picture was a mere chore to Davy, and just as he would have done had school been in session, he waited until the last minutes of that Sunday afternoon to open the envelope. He looked at the page from every angle before shrugging in surrender. “Here goes nothing,” he mumbled, and then lengthened and fattened each of the tubes of brown, gray, and blue emerging from the picture’s red base.
“Want me to ask Mrs. Rossetti for a hint?” Mort said, his palm affectionately encasing the top of Davy’s head. Before he left, Mort bent low for a kiss, which Davy delivered on his cheek.
“I can do it myself,” Davy answered with a weariness that suggested otherwise.
Davy’s heaviness of heart must have touched our father, for he whisked Davy up. “It can’t be that bad,” he told him.
“Homework,” Davy complained into Mort’s chest.
“Homework,” Mort repeated, his voice as grave as Davy’s. “That’s the end of the world. No question. The very end of it.”
He lifted Davy’s face and smiled. “You’re a father’s joy,” he said, which left Davy, once he was back on his feet, silent and nodding—his way of telling Mort that he loved him, too.
The men’s departure began the start of our fifth week in Woodmont, a time when Howard went back to Middletown, as he had the summer before, to help with the store’s semiannual inventory check.
Bec, who hadn’t sewn anything since she’d successfully delivered Mrs. Coventry’s dress, was anxious to begin another project, though this time she planned to sew something for each of us. In years past she’d been the one to decide what she’d make, but Monday night over supper she asked Vivie and Ada to tell her what they wanted. “I’ll make you anything. You name it. I’ll make you the dress of your dreams,” she announced to her sisters, turning from one to the other, then rushing at both of them, pulling each into a strange, desperate hug. Only she knew that with her decision to go to New York she was preparing to leave them. “You’ve both done so much for me,” she said, by way of explanation.
“It’s not like you haven’t done a thing or two for us,” Ada responded, taken aback by the emotional outburst but clearly flattered by it also. Or perhaps it was the idea of the dress of her dreams that pleased my mother so, because the next moment she was patting her pinned-up hair, a gesture that signaled she was feeling the full extent of her beauty, and she told Bec, “Let me just put up a fresh pot of coffee and we’ll get at it. Burgundy, Bec. I just can’t get that burgundy of Mrs. Coventry’s fabric out of my mind.”
Bec was willing to make me the dress of my dreams as well, but I didn’t dream of dresses and had no response for her for several days. It was already Thursday of that fifth week when I told my friends Melissa Bornstein and Anna Weiss about Bec’s offer, and then I described for them the dress that Bec had made for Nina. What did they think about that kind of thing for me? I asked. By way of answering we decided to find the dress, which meant leaving the beach and wandering up our cottage’s front steps, where we walked past Nina, who was on the porch finishing the last chapters of that Lincoln biography. “Hey,” we each called to Nina, who waved to us and murmured a responsive “hey” without even looking up.
We filed into the upstairs bedroom and I pulled from the closet the strapless dress and matching jacket. Holding the dress before my friends, I explained to them that the upper half had fallen down when I’d tried it on earlier that summer, but that didn’t stop them from wanting to see it on me anyway.
This time I knew to hold the dress up, but it fell down again when Melissa grabbed the jacket from my grip and I let go of the dress to grab the jacket back. But before I could, she’d wriggled into it. The yellow background with cream-colored flowers looked ridiculous over her striped bathing suit with its little skirt, but she didn’t seem to notice as she stared in the mirror. “Can I?” she asked, pointing to the dress at my feet, and I assented by stepping out of the way.
“My turn,” Anna soon said. She was on the chunky side, which made for a struggle with the zipper, but as long as she sucked everything in and didn’t breathe, we could pull it up. Pleased with how she looked, she paced across the room, modeling.
“What are you doing?” Nina asked. She was suddenly standing in front of Anna. Startled by Nina’s presence, Anna jumped back as if this upstairs Nina were a ghost of the one we’d passed on the porch.
“But you won’t wear it,” I told Nina.
“It’s mine. She made it for me,” Nina insisted with a possessiveness that didn’t square with the neglect she’d shown all summer toward the dress. To my surprise she grabbed Anna’s shoulders, forcibly turned her, and yanked the back zipper down. Anna’s body, already squeezed tight inside the dress, burst from it, and she stood there, shocked, nearly naked. Nina pointed to the puddle of the dress that circled Anna’s bare feet. “Mine,” she said.
After that I didn’t want a dress and told Bec so. This was the next day, Friday, and Bec was just readying herself for her weekly solitary walk. I didn’t know the dress had meant that much to Nina, I explained to Bec, but it clearly did.
“Can I walk with you?” I asked Bec, feeling low about the incident with my friends and even lower that I’d disappointed Nina.
“Not today,” Bec said, and then she pulled me into a hug, as urgent as the embraces she’d offered Ada and Vivie earlier that week. “I really think the world of you, Molly,” she told me, though I had no idea why. “I just want you to know that.”
It turned out Bec wasn’t the only one acting odd that day. Davy was back to playing with our puppets, but instead of Samson Bagel’s usual heroic exploits, Davy had him beside Vivie in the kitchen, narrating in a voice very much like our mother’s as Vivie mixed eggs in a bowl, preparing to make her first soufflé. And, as if she and Davy had exchanged roles, my mother was on the beach, playing—not cards with the adult women but hopscotch with my friends Melissa and Anna, who clapped as my mother made a series of wobbly but successful one-legged leaps. Nina’s behavior was the most out of character: she was in the back bedroom rather than at her usual reading spot on the porch. Seated at her mother’s vanity, she had her hair twisted and pinned in a style I’d never seen her wear before. For a while I sat on the bed, watching.
“You know what Howard would say about this?” she asked me. Her hair was styled like Bec’s, pinned high and worked into an interesting, complicated twist. “He’d say, ‘You think you know something? Something about fun?’ Then he’d laugh. I hate his laugh.” She laughed then, in just the way she hated. “Molly,” she asked, “why does he always laugh?”
“He’s not here,” I reminded her, though her imitation of him, especially of his laugh, was so true that I could practically see him in the doorway.
But any sense of him disappeared when Nina said, “Right, Molly. So simple. He isn’t here.”
She secured the new hair twist with several more pins and then smiled widely, beautifully. She turned to me. “He isn’t here!” she said.
But it was Friday and the men, including Howard, returned. This was at about five or so, and when Mort entered the house this time no pots were going on the stove, no dishes were set on the table, nor were there challah loaves placed there, because the very idea of them hadn’t yet crossed anyone’s mind that day. Nor had anyone thought to dust or vacuum, and in the living room Nina’s and my sofa bed was still unfolded. All of us, in our way, had had a grand day.
“What difference does it make?” Ada argued to Mort once he’d pulled her from the beach. “We can always light the candles and say the blessings. We don’t need a meal to do that. Can’t we have an easy summer, Mort? Can’t we all have a little fun?”
“What are you asking for, Ada—a whole summer of seventh days?” Mort paced between the kitchen and the dining room, staring stupefied into each. “Look,” he added, “I don’t make the rules. God does.”
“Well, sir,” Ada said as she thrust her balled hands into the pockets of her housedress. “You’re going to have to bargain with me one of these days. This is my cottage. My home.”
“Ada, come on now. We can’t break the rules,” Mort argued, his voice stern. “We live by the law. That’s our job as Jews. That’s what makes us Jews.”
By this time everyone had gathered in the dining room.
“Law?” Ada said. Her tone was piqued, her voice quavering. “Here’s your law,” she asserted. Without looking into a mirror she yanked her mass of hair into a tidy knot. Then she grabbed her black pocketbook, which sat on the table with the telephone on it, pulled a tube of lipstick from it, and smeared the red coloring on her face so that she looked more like a clown than anything else. She stood tall in her wedge sandals as she turned to face Mort. She smiled at him. “Like your law?” she asked, crossing her arms over her loose housedress. Then she pulled the kiddush cup from a cabinet, along with wine, and filled the cup. “Good Shabbos,” she told my father, holding the cup high before she tipped it, pouring the wine down her throat in one long sip. “Good law,” she said, before she smacked her lips. She was shouting when she reached for the bottle again. “Hell, more law! More law!” she said.
Mort left.
He walked through the living room, making his way around the open sofa bed, and stood on the porch, staring at the ocean and at the back of the Isaacsons’ cottage.
Ada stood in the dining room with her hand over her mouth. When she finally dropped it she said to Nina and me, her words repentant, anxious, “Come, girls, let’s clean this house. Come on. Shnel, shnel.”