There was a long-held rumor in the family: Bec didn’t ever sleep with her husband, Nelson, not even once. Three years after Davy’s death she married him, all right, but no one was convinced that she’d done so with even a modicum of passion for Nelson. Add to that how odd they looked together, she such an attractive, stylish woman and he such a sluggish, squat man, and it was hard to see them as a couple. Or at least a couple with any physical life.
And yet the marriage lasted.
Yesterday when I visited Bec’s house I was consumed by those dual mysteries, the way the marriage held and the question of any shared sexual passion between them. Once they’d built their Middletown home in 1953, two years into the marriage, Bec never allowed anyone upstairs. This boundary was similar to the one they’d had from the get-go: they’d never had anyone over to the apartment they shared before that. They were hiding something, we all felt, and what could be more obvious to hide, we figured, than their highly suspected roommate status. Bec reinforced this idea in the way she described the upstairs rooms: a study, a guest bedroom (though they never had guests who stayed over), and “the bedroom.” Not once did she say “our bedroom,” or even “his” or “my” bedroom.
Last night—New Year’s Eve—I climbed the stairs with trepidation, as if finally entering that private realm would bring to it, or myself, some kind of bad luck. Yet how could I make this place my home if half of it was closed off to me? I argued, climbing farther.
Earlier in the day I’d e-mailed Nina the weekly note I sent her. We’d begun exchanging updates after that first visit I made to Berkeley following Howard’s death. I sent mine even before hers arrived. There was so much talk of doom this particular New Year’s Eve, I wasn’t taking chances. Happy New Millennium, I wrote. Fingers crossed, I added, We’re good to go in the a.m. And because it was Friday I closed the usual way: Shabbat Shalom, dearest Nina.
Hours later I went upstairs. What I saw there was a bedroom, attractive enough and comfortable. A double bed covered with a gray bedspread. A matching gray carpet with a complementary border design of dusty-mauve-colored roses. Straightforward enough furnishings that said nothing of how Bec and Nelson had lived their lives. The guest bedroom offered no clues either. So this is it, I told myself, realizing I wasn’t ever going to know any more than I already did, that all the mysteries of the inheritance were coming along with it.
Yet it always seemed that Bec lived here well, or well enough. She did the best she could. After Davy’s accident she became what we all became, a survivor of one sort or another, though her guilt—those open arms she held out to Davy—was overwhelming. She had as much reason to blame herself as everyone else involved, and for a long while, she did just that.
But then she took a turn the others didn’t take. On the long, tortuous road away from herself, she somehow reversed the process, came back.
Her marriage to Nelson was a first step, though at the time she wouldn’t have thought of it that way. Back then the bond between the two was all about their shared grief and shared guilt. Nelson was the first to confess his culpability. He knew about Megan O’Donnell before anyone else did, he told Bec. He could have discouraged Howard, told him he was nuts. And if he had…He shook his head. He stared not at Bec, who sat across from him at Regina’s restaurant, where they were out for lunch. Early April of 1951, and they’d been coming there for lunch every Saturday for over a year, yet for the first time ever Bec gave Nelson what felt to him like her whole attention. Then she told him her part of it.
“I don’t feel so alone,” she said once she’d finished, turning to Nelson as they rose to fetch their coats at the meal’s end. “Thank you for that. I don’t feel good. Just not so alone.”
“Me too,” Nelson had said.
Once she married Nelson, some five months later, she had more reason than before to stop in every so often at Leibritsky’s Department Store, and the work there—which gradually became central to Bec’s life—was another step bringing her closer to her lost self, the person she was the moment before she opened her arms to Davy from the other side of Beach Avenue.
At first her trips to the store were only occasional, and mostly to get away from Ada, whom Bec still cared for. By the fall of 1951 my mother was functioning well enough, but she’d turned her loss of Davy into many unappealing things: a reason to hate the largely Italian community of Middletown, a reason to hate especially clear and sunny days, a reason to hate her present life in favor of an ever more nostalgically perfected past.
Bec, like the rest of us, didn’t have the patience she’d once had for Ada, despite her lingering anguish. And so Bec occasionally gave herself a day off, spending the morning quietly at home, sipping coffee at the table, staring out the window, then flipping on the radio and listening to whatever program she happened upon. But sometimes she spent those rare mornings cooking something up for Nelson for lunch. “Hot lunch,” she’d then announce, marching into Leibritsky’s Department Store, the paper bag in her arms filled with containers of roasted chicken, mashed potatoes, and boiled peas.
Early April of 1952 Bec had done just that, brought Nelson a hot lunch, when she made her first foray into business, suggesting before she even set down the bag of food a minor rearrangement of the sales floor. Some women’s hats had come in, perfect for Easter. “Perhaps if you put that hat rack where more women see it,” Bec said, turning to Mort, “more would sell.” She smiled, as glad to stretch some old, unused muscle in her mind as she was to be away from Ada. Though her sister had shed her initial anger at Nina for fibbing about Howard, for setting her in motion that day out the door and on the chase, she continued to hold on to her blame of Sal Luccino. If Ada had been ugly with her prejudice before the accident, after it she was worse, more hateful, more irrationally so. But it was easier for Ada to blame Sal, Bec knew, than herself. And the strategy, however unfair, may very well have been the only way her sister could survive. The ugliness was choking, though, and on that day Bec had fled, leaving Ada with her bitterness.
At Leibritsky’s, Bec glanced from Mort to the hat rack, motioning that the rack should be moved from the rear of the store, where the women’s apparel was, to the entrance.
Mort thought not. “I think we know what we’re doing by now,” he told her.
Bec opened her mouth to disagree, but the way Mort looked, the tightness in his neck and jaw, the slight rise of his chest, suggested to her that she had best be quiet. “Just a thought,” she managed at long last to mutter.
A month later, once Bec and Nelson finished lunch—salami grinders which they ate in the basement while listening to a new Sinatra album—Bec attempted again to make a change in the way the store did business.
She and Nelson had just emerged from below when a female customer walked in. She looked around then turned to Leo, and then to Nelson.
“I’m looking for a dress for my daughter’s graduation,” the woman explained. “I’ve been to two other places but the folks there were so pushy. And they just don’t seem to have what I want.”
“Leibritsky’s never pushes,” Bec said, scooting past Leo and Nelson, then taking the woman’s gloved hand in her own. And even though Bec did push, urging the woman, by way of compliments, to purchase both an afternoon and an evening dress, the woman said at the end, speaking to Mort, who rang up the purchase, “She was right. She knew exactly what I wanted.”
Only Howard, now at Wesleyan, had been so slick at sales. Once the woman left, Leo pointed that out to Mort. But Mort said nothing, just looked stone-faced as he held the door open for Bec even before she was gloved, buttoned, and ready to go.
That night Bec asked Nelson if she’d gone too far. “I really do think I see what the store could use,” she told him, recalling the hat rack they should have moved. “I’ve got an itch to participate. But maybe the thing to do is to set up my own dressmaking shop,” she said.
“Mort’s a bully,” Nelson remarked, surprising Bec. “The more you fade away with each punch, the stronger Mort gets.”
Emboldened by Nelson’s words, the next time Bec went to Leibritsky’s she insisted the hat rack be moved. As a matter of fact, she added, she had ideas about rearranging the departments, changing their locations so that “one thing, naturally enough, leads to the next.” First in that process, she declared, was women’s clothes and accessories, which should be moved from the back to the front, where the men’s clothes were now. “Let’s face it. Far more of your customers are women,” she told Mort, who with his bristling was clinging, she saw, to what little control he had left in the world. “But everything she’s said makes sense,” Leo pointed out as Mort stood, arms crossed, his chin tucked in, slowly shaking his head.
Despite Mort’s resistance, Leo’s comment pushed the debate in Bec’s direction. After a stretch of silence, Mort relented. “We’ll try it for a month,” he said before turning from them and shutting himself in his office for the rest of the afternoon.
That month was a good one for profits, and another boom month led to the next until finally, come the new year, even Mort agreed the change should be permanent. Bec’s next idea came readily enough and included that the very items Leibritsky’s Department Store sold were problematic. “You’re out of date,” she told the men on a cloudy afternoon in February 1953. She straightened Nelson’s ten-year-old tie. She brushed the dusty shoulders of Mort’s ancient suit jacket. For Leo, drowning in his oversized pants and jacket, she offered only a sad smile. “Just look at you,” she said to the three, shaking her head. “Not even a whiff of fashion sense.”
The next morning my father woke from a troubling dream. He and his father were standing on the Leibritsky’s Department Store sales floor, though the place, oddly, was clean of any merchandise. Zelik Leibritsky, facing him, wore a business suit, stylishly double-breasted. On his feet were gleaming wing tips, which was also strange. Mort wanted to ask his father, “What happened to you?” but before he did his father asked him that very question.
“What do you mean?” Mort’s forehead was beaded with sweat.
“I started this store in nineteen nineteen,” his father told him. “Back then Jews weren’t always welcome in the stores of goyim, or in the doctors’ offices of goyim, or in the universities of goyim, or even in their towns. But it’s a different day now.”
Zelik was already leaving. As he opened the front door and a gust of cold February air blew in, he asked, “How’s Mrs. Leibritsky?”
“What’s Ada got to do with this?” Mort was chilled by the air and confused by the question.
“That’s just it,” Zelik said. “My son, times have changed. There’s more than one Mrs. Leibritsky now.”
As Zelik left, walking down Main Street, he became smaller, then smaller still, until finally the man looked to be the size of a boy, someone eight years old, say, and then he was nothing, just the palpable absence of someone disappeared.
Mort shot up, awake, and reviewed the sequence of events that had led to Davy’s accident. He could see Nina polishing the candlestick just as she was telling Ada about the Irish girl. And he could see Ada running out of the house, and even hear her sandals clomp as she rushed out onto Beach Avenue. He could see Howard tumble from the Sailfish and shoot forward, swimming to shore. And if he had not indulged himself in a hot dog. He could see Bec across Beach Avenue, surprised and delighted at the sight of Ada and the children. And he could see Sal Luccino in his driver’s seat, leaning out the side window of his truck. And if he had not been late.
My father pushed himself to his feet, attempting to rise from his bed. But he couldn’t.
He fell back. He fainted.
In 1972 I began to work at Leibritsky’s Department Store. Bec was fully in charge of the store by then. My father, who ever since that dream had come to the store not five days a week but three days, or sometimes two, had finally fully retired. Leo retired as well. Nelson, at sixty-six years old, still hung about the place, but mainly in the mornings. For so many years already Nelson’s role was mainly as Bec’s helping hand, a function for which he was so much better suited than that of the store’s so-called business executive. He had ample time, then, in the afternoons to sit at the booth in his kitchen, flipping through cookbooks, planning what to make Bec that night. She didn’t love him, she merely liked him, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t love her. In his married life Nelson gave himself that much freedom and in doing so he became, to everyone’s astonishment, an accomplished chef.
The year I came to Leibritsky’s, Bec would begin the third and final step in her largely accidental process of self-reclamation: she would start to sew again, make dresses to order. One quiet Saturday night in May she had Nelson help her lug her old Singer up from the basement and move it to a corner of the living room. Carefully, she greased the treadle. Minutes later, her foot pumping, she revved the ancient thing back to life.
By the end of that evening she knew she’d buy an electric; of course she would. No one would take her seriously with that primitive clunker. Swiping her brow, she knew she wouldn’t have to work as hard either. But she grew unnerved by the thought that she’d lose the physical give and take between herself and the machine if it were powered by some foreign, outside source. Electricity would take her body out of it, the body that was the conduit for the language she and the Singer had come to speak, were speaking again.
“How’s it going?” Nelson asked as he looked in on her later that night.
“Lost in talk,” Bec answered, nodding. “Lost in talk.”
Lost in talk was how I often felt with Bec, who by then had become one of my closest friends as well as a kind of second mother. Since my divorce in 1966 we’d met every other week or so for dinner out, just us two. “I don’t like that you’re so alone, Molly,” Bec had told me when we’d begun sharing meals.
A month after Bec had revived her dormant Singer we met at a small Greek restaurant in Hartford, close enough to G. Fox’s that I could walk there when I got off that night from work. Lost in talk that night meant that Bec listened and nodded as I complained about the man I was then dating, Bob Neddlestein, who had a job at Aetna Insurance. He was at the top of Aetna’s corporate ladder, had plenty of money, and once we began our relationship he liked to treat me to lavish vacations. I’d never been on lavish vacations before and they were certainly easy to take, even if I sometimes yawned at the dinner table conversation. That night with Bec, Bob and I had just returned from a week at a Swiss spa, where I’d done as much yawning as lying around.
“An entire week of lying around?” Bec looked skeptical.
“Pretty much,” I answered. “The whole point of a spa is to relax. We read. Talked. Ate. Bob took long swims and I took mineral baths. In the afternoons we both couldn’t help it: we napped.” I nodded, recalling the pleasant enough bed I’d so easily dropped off on. “We went to bed early, too,” I added.
“Oh, Molly,” Bec said, clearly disappointed. “You sound like you’re eighty years old. I just don’t believe that two people who love each other, healthy and young enough like you two, rest and nap and go to bed early for an entire vacation.”
I was eating a salad, but I stopped. I’d never heard Bec talk about the nuts and bolts of romance, but here she was, doing so with surprising authority.
“You’re not even close to being in love,” she continued. “What are you doing with that man? Is this Mark Fishbaum all over again? Are you just filling a hole? Is that what this is?”
When I dropped my fork, flummoxed, a waiter came rushing over to hand me a new one.
“I think there was something a little more genuine with Mark,” I told Bec after a time. My words, measured, were also sad.
She nodded. “Of course there was.” Her tone was gentler. “All that history. That’s very real stuff, Molly. You can’t say he didn’t know where you were coming from.”
“No. Can’t say that.”
I went silent. Bec ate some of her food but I only stared at my salad.
“Penny for your thoughts,” Bec said after some minutes had passed.
I shrugged but otherwise didn’t answer.
She waited another minute. “Two pennies.”
“I was just remembering how I woke up this morning at seven fifteen,” I told Bec, my voice hesitant. “I sat on the side of the bed and all I could do was look down at my bare feet. When I looked at the clock again it was nine twelve. Bec, I don’t know where the time went.” I paused. “Which is kind of what I’d say about my whole life.”
Bec sighed. “Molly, maybe a change of scenery would be good,” she then suggested. Soon enough she rolled out her plan: she and I would co-own the family store. We’d rename Leibritsky’s Department Store, simply enough, Leibritsky’s. The new place would be just for women’s wear, much of it specially made by her. She wanted it to look like a parlor, with plush upholstered chairs strewn throughout and an openness that would replace the cramped aisles. She also wanted a back room for her sewing machines, the old Singer that she couldn’t part with and the new one she’d just bought. “Eleanor Roosevelt,” she said, speaking of her aged mannequin, “is dusted off and ready to go too.”
I listened, ate some salad, listened some more.
A moment later, when I still hadn’t spoken, she grew even more intent. “I’m throwing you a lifeline. Grab it, Molly. Grab it.”
“I’m not drowning,” I insisted.
“No? Seems to me you’ve been under water since you were twelve years old,” she said.
And with that—a smack of truth—I agreed to become part of Leibritsky’s.
And with that—Bec’s and my co-ownership—Leibritsky’s stopped having anything at all to do with men.
We worked well together, Bec and I, and when I think of those years, which were the years of my late thirties and forties, I can’t help but feel the relief that the change was meant to bring, as big a relief as breaking it off, finally, with Bob Neddlestein. Bec’s and my joint venture worked straightforwardly: as the store’s buyer I sometimes traveled, but more often I was in town, in the store, generally managing things. Bec was pretty much always in the back room, making something. Her reputation spread quickly throughout the Connecticut River Valley.
Though busy, we made time for each other, lunching together at least three times a week. All those years, then, we were lost in talk. And all those words and lunches and dresses and customers added up to something profound. She showed me that, in the end, with the gift of her house.
In 1986, when Bec was seventy-five, she began to consider retiring. Nelson had already died, as had Leo and my father—the deaths of age and illness, which were deeply sad but not shocking, bruising, unacceptable deaths. But Bec seemed to flourish with time rather than wither. How often did I see her, a woman in her seventies, bending over one of her worktables, her forehead wrinkled in concentration, scissors in hand, slicing through a sheet of fabric, only to look up suddenly and break into a wide smile and an effortless wave? How pretty she was, I often thought, waving back, apologizing if I’d interrupted her. Her short hair curled around her face, her glasses hung over her chest, her typical plain turtleneck fit snugly about her upper body, her slacks bagged around her bottom, and her shoes—“old lady” shoes, I used to call them, thick with rubber soles—lifted her nearly an inch from the floor. Though fashion was her work, she was hardly a beacon of style anymore herself. She was simply somebody who made things—dresses, it turned out—and as long as she was concentrating on her craft she was satisfied. That absorption was her beauty, and it was a gift to witness.
We were, as they say, ladies of a certain age, both of whom had been married and not, both of whom had had careers that were unexpected and unexpectedly long, both of whom had never had children and therefore wouldn’t have grandchildren, both of whom had extra time during the evenings which were often spent alone. Late winter of 1986, though Bec could certainly justify retiring, she still wasn’t sure. She had her health. She was a little stiff, maybe, but otherwise, she said, she couldn’t complain. What would she do with her days? We talked about this one evening. She had a dress in one hand at the time, a bat mitzvah dress, a green velvet mini, and the steamer in the other, giving it the final touch. Once it was done, she held it up for me to see.
“Wasn’t so long ago when a girl wouldn’t even dream of having a bat mitzvah, much less having one in a minidress,” she said.
She nodded thoughtfully. But after a minute it seemed to me her mind was less on the dress than on some private memory. She smiled to herself.
I mentioned how lovely I thought the dress was and she refocused, hanging it on a nearby rack. Then she sat. For a time, while I fussed with paperwork, she was quiet.
I’m not sure how much time passed, but eventually I turned her way. “So?” I said.
“So?”
“So what do we do now?” I closed the accounts book I had opened and scooped up my paperwork.
Bec laughed, and when I turned her way she said, “Molly, you sound just like you did as a child. ‘What do we do now?’ How many times did I hear that? The three of you never seemed to know quite how to fill a day. But Nina could. She was in the driver’s seat, even then. Am I right?”
“Nina didn’t always know,” I suggested, but without much conviction. “She had her moments too.”
Again we were silent, and as Bec reached for some peanuts her quiet munching was the only sound that filled the room. “I can hear myself asking that question,” she said after a time. “We were little girls once, me and Ada and Vivie, and we asked it over and over. Our father would get exasperated sometimes. He’d turn to our mother and say, ‘What are you waiting for? Tell them what to do!’ ‘Be good,’ she’d say to us. ‘Be good girls.’ ” Bec laughed. “But that wasn’t anything to do.”
Bec walked over to the dress and tugged at it, though it didn’t need adjusting.
“I was supposed to marry Milton Goldberg,” she continued. I knew as much. I nodded. “And when he broke it off, I had to ask myself, ‘What do I do now?’ I was sewing at the time, so it seemed a pretty good idea, to keep on sewing.”
“But would you have been happy as Mrs. Goldberg?” I asked. I was thinking less of the past than of the present, of our contented time running the store. Nothing about marrying Milton Goldberg would have gotten her to this place, I suspected, and told her as much.
“Maybe. But there would have been children,” she said. “That part of it, at least, I know I would have liked.”
She turned to me, and recognizing that it was loss, too, that had clouded my life during my childbearing years, she pulled me close. “We’re a pair,” she whispered. “You and me, Molly.”
“A pair of Leibritskys,” I said, and for some reason that made us laugh.
When we ate lunch together the next day Bec told me the story of her and Tyler McMannus. Our talk the night before—its “what ifs”—had clearly stirred her up. That she’d withheld such a tale amazed me. I thought I knew her completely. “Not such a pair of Leibritskys,” I suggested at one point.
“Why didn’t you go back?” I asked some minutes later, after she told me about that doomed trip to New Haven in those months after Davy’s death. “Why’d you marry Nelson?”
“I made Tyler wait too long,” she said. “In fact, for a while I actually gave up on him. He knew it better than me.”
She stared into her teacup for several minutes. When she looked up, her smile was deliberate. “Well, as it turned out I wasn’t alone. I had Nelson. And what we shared between us, about Davy, was quite a bond, really. And then we grew to know each other. Nelson, you know, was a pretty dear fellow. He told me over and over again that he’d never hold me back.”
I’d heard Nelson say that very thing.
“But he wasn’t Tyler,” I remarked.
“God, no,” was all she said to that.
We finally paid the bill, then walked arm in arm up Main Street. Bare dogwoods, still decorated with holiday lights, lined the street. “Did you ever speak to Tyler after that?” I asked. By that I meant the day she saw Tyler with his newborn and his wife. We’d gotten that far in her recollections.
“No, never.”
“You didn’t try to get in touch even once?”
“Oh, I tried,” she said. “You’ve no idea how I tried.” She almost stumbled and I grabbed her arm. When she turned to thank me her expression was strained.
“Too late to try again?” I asked, gently, as we moved forward once more.
“Much too late. He’s dead. Gone six years now.”
We’d approached the store but she didn’t seem in a hurry to get back to work. As we lingered outside, I asked, “Did you go to his funeral?”
“No. I would have, but I found out too late. He was buried by the time I knew. But I’ve taken a drive, visited his grave from time to time. I like to bring him flowers. Him and Sal Luccino. Found his grave, too, not far from Tyler’s. Wasn’t looking for it. Just found it. Amidst a whole crowd of Luccinos.”
She nodded while I took a moment to take in the news of Sal.
“Maybe you and Tyler can be buried side by side,” I finally offered, thinking—nonsensically—they’d at least have that.
“I’d rather be able to really talk to him, but I appreciate the thought. Anyway, it’s a Catholic cemetery. I can visit, Molly, but I can’t stay, not for the long haul. Besides,” she added, “at this point I want to be buried near my sisters.”
She opened the door of the store and I followed her to the back room, where we hung up our coats.
“Molly,” she called as I left for the sales floor. Her tone had a touch of urgency. “It’s you who can still go back,” she said.