AFTER SHE GOT THE news, Molly prayed, a thing she always did in secret. Dressed in a nightshirt, glasses off, wavy hair falling, she sat on her college dormitory bed and it came reflexively. She prayed to Jesus. Not apostatically or in revelation or contradiction of her people or her parents, she called the name that to her did not signify the son of God but the absent spirit of comfort. As a child, Molly had believed in angels, and maybe she still did, though she would never admit it. She had heard of them not from her socialist parents or (God forbid) rabbis but in story-books and in songs and on the street at Christmas, had first seen their images hung in shop windows and on evergreens on snowy avenues in December. Nine years old, she had believed in guardian angels and that she might in fact be an angel. Tucked in her bed in the Goodman apartment on Riverside Drive (they had moved uptown to one of those new tall brick apartment towers some years after Molly was born), her brother Carl in the bedroom next door reading Sherlock Holmes or Ivanhoe or The Last of the Mohicans or maybe Houdini: Master of Escape, her father, Abe Goodman, editor of Progress, barking and laughing in the dining room full of Marxists and Freudians, lawyers and poets and professors and assorted educated humanist Jews, Molly plumbed the air of her room for singing voices. A secret, invisible arm of her imagination shaped like a butterfly net scooped the space of the clean white plaster-walled room four floors above 89th Street and Riverside Drive. She wanted to catch the humming, chanting spirits of Lenape Indians buried by the railroad tracks near the Hudson, maybe Dutch sea captains or English pirates’ wives; she wanted to reach the ancient ghosts of her ancestors Goodman and Thaler, in Vienna or in Berlin. Molly at nine was a dreamy long-haired girl who stared out windows at the river and rain, who clasped her arms around her father’s leg and sang.
But sex changed that. Sometime after her twelfth birthday she was wandering the back hall of the apartment, the hall that connected her room and her brother’s and the toilet they shared, and she heard a commotion from behind Carl’s door. What Molly saw when she pushed it open confused her: two thirteen-year-old boys caught in an embarrassed tableau. On his knees and looking at her was Lyden Silver, the son of her father’s best friend, and above him was big dark Carl, who held a rope. Lyden was shirtless, his vest, collar, and undershirt all scattered on Carl’s bed, and his pants were off. He wore only undershorts. The rope wrapped around his naked chest twice and it cut lines into his little pectoral muscles and triceps and then went right around his slim waist and thighs, and as Molly’s eyes followed the rope trying to figure out what it was doing to Lyden, she felt a tingle.
He had always seemed to her funny-looking, but now she didn’t notice Lyden’s face, just that skinny white body of taut, bound muscles. He had taken off his clothes to reveal a monster. Lyden and Carl were playing Escape, taking turns. Lyden was flexing his muscles to slack the rope. Before a word came from anyone, Carl leapt across the room. One stride and one big arm swinging, he closed the door, bang, so that Molly’s fingers almost got caught, and she had to pull back and blink. But she never forgot that image and sometimes in bed at night she thought not of ghosts or angels but of Lyden Silver’s tensed, white, bound body.
Picture Molly at fifteen with her long hair knotted loosely behind her and her round wire glasses on her pretty nose, a glass of wine in her hand. She is laughing. The Silvers are over for dinner, a party as it is so often at the Goodmans’. A nervous journalist from downtown has a dirty collar and stained teeth and a certain romance to his disheveled hair. A bearded guest, recently from Europe, doesn’t say much, smokes a pipe, smiles at Molly, and makes her nervous. Abe Goodman is enormous and everywhere, big ramshackle arms and legs like Carl’s but with a round gut and a shining bald head. He refills glasses, stalks the room, wine bottle drawn like a six-shooter. He puts that down only to grab a plate of crackers, which he presses at guests violently with two hands. It seems an affectation, as if Abe—the smartest son of Albany haberdashers—is putting on a show of his crudeness, some kind of display of socialist credentials, the way he affects Yiddishisms and the shrugs of downtown distant cousins, but the truth is his manners are better in company than in private. At home with just the wife and kids he will use a finger to spread mayonnaise. Belle, Molly’s mother, small and fine-featured, expresses her anxieties differently. “Sit, sit. Abe, please, that’s enough.” Which makes Michael and Clarissa Silver laugh. These are the Goodmans’ best friends. In summer, the families rent houses together in the leafy Bronx. Michael Silver’s red hair has gone prematurely white and his face is shy and round and pink and handsome. Clarissa’s maiden name is Lyden, and she looks very much the daughter of a Massachusetts Harvard man that she is: tall with an aristocratic nose and her yellow hair fading. The parents’ worst features combine in their son. Lyden has his mother’s high forehead and her long Dutch nose, his father’s complexion and lips. But there’s a power to little red-haired Lyden. Next to big, dark, languorous Carl, he seems quick and compact and ready to explode.
In the living room, with Michael and Clarissa laughing at Abe while Carl slouches in an armchair, big legs sprawling forward, Lyden stands strapped behind his stiff collar and stares straight at Molly. She stops laughing. There is something about his intensity that, even as it attracts, almost frightens her. The two have taken walks together in pastures behind those rented houses in the Bronx. Lyden has never tried to kiss her, but once on the top of a hill he paused, yellow flowers all around and bees buzzing and sweat beading on Molly’s brow.
“Do you believe in God?” he asked, out of nowhere. He was standing on a rise and she below him, still hiking with her heavy skirt beating against her legs.
“What’s that?” asked Molly, panting a little and moving a hair away from her chin. She had heard the question, but could not believe it.
Lyden’s head was set against the clear blue sky, and this hardened the outlines of his face, the high forehead which made it seem at sixteen that he was losing his hair, the long nose, the mouth with its arrogant droop.
“Because I don’t,” he said, nervous and hesitant. But there was something urgent in his blurting, and she felt that secret monster peeking out from his speech—his desire, his power, all kept on a short, tight leash. “I have been reading,” he said, and waved a hand as if to signal there was more. “About the Turks in Armenia. About the Belgians in the Congo. The little, chopped-off hands of children. We live in a horrid age, Molly. You can’t, you know,” and he stared down at her, “you can’t believe in God.”
“You’re forbidding me?” She laughed.
“I’m just saying. This is the age we live in, Molly.” He gestured at the pine trees as though they were his example. “We can’t build it on superstition. The only way, the only hope is the brotherhood of man.”
“Oh.” She could not conceal her disappointment.
Those hands which were now stuffed back in his shy pockets ought to have been after her waist, and that awkward mouth ought to have been kissing her—or at least trying to. Lyden was three years older than she, but now seemed dismally young. While he had been up all night with his histories of atrocities, she had been reading Austen and Brontë, and certain insights into the world were hers. Lyden’s talk masked cowardice. The boy was too shy to kiss her.
“I promise,” she said dismally. “Never to believe in God.” Then she hiked past him toward the hilltop.
But in her dormitory room in Poughkeepsie, she regressed and pleaded. Carl was dead, one of a few hundred in his regiment on a muddy field in Alsace, the green uniform in which he had looked so handsome—it brought out the color in his cheeks, the ferocity of his dark hair—was torn and bloody and his cold body mutilated within. Amateur magician, Carl had pulled scarves from thin air at birthday parties when he was younger, but the crusted red on his chest was no felt rag for him to disappear.
Her mother had pronounced his name like it contained the wonder of great technological advances, “Carl,” like “Marconi” or “airplane,” as if she were an accidental Edison who had given birth to a great battery of the modern age. And her father pretended not to be interested in his son’s successes in love, in school, in tennis, but would ask, when Carl was out of the room, “How many did he score?” Abe assumed his son would take over the publishing business, but Belle’s ambitions knew no such limits. A judge? A governor? Senator Goodman? Molly had watched him grow aloof—what others might have called arrogance, the Goodmans saw as princely right.
But something had happened in the last year of prep school to indicate the limits of those rights. Carl had met a girl at a dance and had not been permitted to call on her. Her father would not allow a Jew in his house—made a production about a Jew at a dance—and the frightened girl had told Carl to stay away. Molly had fantasies: Carl would leap the front steps in tennis whites, whack the liveried butler with his racket. Or maybe he would pluck the awful prejudice from behind the girl’s ear, the way he did the ace of spades from behind Molly’s when she was younger, shuffle it in a deck, and deal out a more harmonious city. There had been fights after he enlisted, chose the army over Yale. For Abe it was treason, his own son tool of the moneyed bosses.
“War to end wars? More like to keep up capitalistic interests. Why don’t you just sign on for the Pinkertons? Go shoot Negroes in Alabama! Safe for democracy! I never dreamed my son would be such a fool.”
Carl lit a cigarette and let that hostility linger in the living room, his cool manners in opposition to his father’s.
“Abe,” said Belle. “You’re pushing him.”
“I’m not bothered.” Carl was an inch taller, and stood erect while Abe slouched; he towered over his father. “It’s fine.”
“Fine?” said Belle. Her mouth pinched and her eyes squinted. “Sure, it’s fine. Go kill yourself. Fine with me. Go. Get shot. Kill German people. They’ve done terrible things to you, Carl. They’re the ones who won’t let you see this girl. Yes, I know about the girl, and yes, don’t fool yourself, when that cannonball comes rocketing at you and you feel you’ve got to catch it, your father is right, absolutely, you’ll be doing it for Morgans and Rockefellers and Hearst, and believe me, the brother of that Fifth Avenue girl you like, that brother is not going to be standing next to you, there for the next bomb to hit. He’s going to be sensibly and comfortably in New Haven, where his father put him, out of harm’s way.”
“I’m pushing him?” Abe asked.
“Mom. Pop,” said Carl. “I’ll be fine.”
For Molly there seemed to be no choice for Carl but to enlist. She imagined that girl who had refused him—Molly never learned her name—fair-haired and cream-skinned and dressed in an elaborate gown. Rain would beat against the windowpanes of her Fifth Avenue bedroom, and her tears would fall across a page, blurring the words Carl had written from the front. Molly thrilled at the possibilities of heartache.
“He doesn’t want to be Jewish,” Belle theorized in the living room later when Carl was gone—to take a walk, that’s what he’d told everyone, to clear his head. But it was typical, Carl avoiding his family. The new backhanded trick he had learned was how to make himself disappear. “That’s what this is about. I’m convinced. Some crazy idea to make himself American. To make himself what his father can’t be—”
“You’re blaming me?” A glass of wine in one hand, the other raised toward the ceiling. “Was I ever so Jewish? Did I say to him, go, be Jewish? Did I make him even a bar mitzvah? Scientific principles. Read Freud. There is a simple psychological explanation for your son. What he is trying to do is kill me.”
When Carl came back from his walk, his parents went quiet. He took off his long gray coat, shook it once in the hall by the elevator, then folded it neatly to be hung in the bathroom. His hair was sleek and wet with rain; he’d gone hatless, no umbrella. Molly had never seen him so beautiful. He was a man and that’s what his parents missed. For Molly that explained his enlistment, to be a soldier and not a boy. She was for the romance, the excitement of it.
But sitting on her dormitory bed at Vassar with that telegram in her hand, that romance was a meal that had made her sick.
“Jesus,” she moaned.
She begged Him to make it a lie, to bring back the time just twenty minutes before and to make that telegram say something else—some other death, God forbid, any other death, not her brother’s. Then, after Jesus, she tried to reach Carl. She concentrated, pulled a trick out of her childhood, stretched her mind across barriers of time and space and life. Her mind like a phantom limb reached hopelessly, stretching eastward over the Atlantic all the way to France and then under the surface of some more metaphorical ocean to the lost Atlantis of the dead. And she felt a spiritual thing, hard and light and warming.
“Oh, Carl.” She crumpled the telegram.
Best as she could, Molly composed herself, pinned a black veil under the brim of her hat, and headed home. A locomotive howled as it pulled into the station. Men gripped their hats against the draft. Molly took a seat on the left side of the car, away from the river while the train went south, but she was running against the commuters and because no one sat across the way, her view of the Hudson was clear. Late October and the oaks and maples put on their show. The train passed a marshy patch, a flock of geese rose. The sun set when she was somewhere near the zoo and the Botanical Garden. Streetlights flickered in the trees. The city was a glow that disappeared behind the hills of Inwood, but then it reemerged with its high white finials and bright windows against the blue of evening. Rat-tat-tat, they went above Harlem, tenements and apartment houses, and on the sidewalks below, the Negro city swarmed.
Grand Central, her father waited at the head of the platform. She saw him before he spotted her and Molly could not believe how hunched and ordinary he looked, how old, how frightened, how tired. Abe Goodman was a big man with a powerful head and hands that gripped like vises, but the throng rushed against him and he stood alone in his black raincoat while everyone else was dressed for a clear fall day. He held his hat, showing his baldness. His eyes were wide and tired and the skin sagged from his face and neck. She was a yard away when he recognized her. They hesitated before they embraced, and then all of a sudden were fighting about whether Abe or a redcap would carry her valise.
“You’re lugging that yourself?”
“It’s nothing.” She had packed little more than underwear and a book of poetry.
“Let me.” He grabbed.
“Dad.”
“Please,” he insisted.
She wanted to relent, but before she could hand it over, Abe snatched, wrenched it from her grasp.
“Daddy—Christ! Are you all right?”
“Me?” He looked away, started moving. “Do you want to take a cab or the subway?”
“Dad—”
“Tell me.”
“I don’t—”
“If you want to take a taxicab we’ll take a taxicab, but the subway would be just as easy.”
Which was flagrantly perverse.
He bowed his head and charged, bald prow pressing through the rush-hour crowds under the constellations of the painted ceiling, knuckles white with his grip on the handle of her bag. Big shoulders hunched. Commuters startled in his wake. Molly had to hurry to keep up. Her father was more than her frayed personality could stand.
Up the marble stairs Abe charged, onto Vanderbilt Avenue, Molly trailing behind abstractedly and anxious. A newsboy mumbled headlines, an old man had a basket full of puppies. Cabs were circling under the glass awning, and Abe beat a couple dressed in evening wear to a big green one. He stood impatiently by the running board and ordered Molly into the back seat.
“Are you all right?” Molly asked again, after her father gave directions to the driver.
“I’m fine,” he said. “You?” When Molly didn’t answer—she couldn’t—he continued, “I can’t say that I’m surprised that he got killed—”
“Jesus—”
“What?”
“It’s not a question of—”
“Don’t get excited. You’re upset, but that’s no reason to get—”
“I’m not—”
“Please.” He laid his hand on her knee and, to mollify his daughter, told her what a wreck her mother was. “She blames herself, says she should have never let Carl go. Bullshit.” He looked away. “I understood this from the start. It’s like the time when he was five years old and he liked playing on the railroad tracks—”
“Dad—”
“What?”
“I can’t do it this way. Can we? Can we just for a bit?”
“You’re upset. I understand. But there’s no reason to be so anxious.”
Headlights illuminated Abe’s face and Molly saw his eyes were wet and rimmed with red. He had not shaved that morning. On his lapel he wore a small ribbon with a cut in it. A trolley passed, the cab moved forward, and as they entered the roadway at the southern end of Central Park, the back seat went dark.
At home there were aunts and uncles, people Molly did not recognize, and of course the Silvers. Clarissa was the first to greet her, shouting, “Belle, Belle, it’s Molly!” The apartment smelled of fish and soup and sweets and baking, and Clarissa wore a long black dress and her hair was perched high on her head. She grabbed Molly and swayed and broke out sobbing.
Molly was aware mostly of her father just steps behind her saying, “Go, go!” from the foyer. Abe wanted to get into the apartment, to lay down her suitcase. He wanted a drink. And the tears that had come to her so easily in her dormitory room at Vassar were nowhere. Molly accepted Clarissa’s embrace, rocked in the arms of her beloved neighbor-almost-aunt, but simultaneously felt a distance from her loss, as if it were she who ought to have been consoling Clarissa and not vice versa. How could she even be standing erect?
Her brother had died. She had no business taking trains and taxicabs or hugging Clarissa. She ought to have been lying there on the floor of her dormitory room. Uniformed men ought to have carried her out the door, an ambulance ought to have carted her to her parents’ place; she ought to have been crushed. When Molly had unfolded the telegram and seen the greenish paper and its greener ink, the letters of Carl’s name had popped off the page through her eyes and smacked the back of her skull. But now, weirdly in possession of her social sensibilities, she felt insufficiently sad.
Michael Silver would be next. She saw him hovering behind Clarissa, little, white-haired, head bent, patiently waiting to kiss her. And she felt Clarissa’s bones and thinness. Everyone had gotten old since the summer. And somewhere in the room was her mother. Molly knew she ought to want to see her mother, but really she wanted a bath. She wanted to sit in her bed, to read a newspaper. She wanted to stare out the window as she had as a girl, to see the park and the river and the trains below. Also, she wanted to curl in her mother’s lap and sob. It was all too much. Maybe if she could talk to Carl—but before that thought was done she realized there would be no Carl, never again.
Clarissa released Molly, who stumbled and wiped her nose. Michael Silver took her two hands in his.
“I’m so sorry,” he said.
Molly tried to talk, but couldn’t. Her throat contracted.
Her father took her coat, Clarissa took her hand. The rooms were noisy. Molly was led out of the front hall and into the living room, where in a corner Belle sat in a blue chair, immovable. Either she had not heard Clarissa’s cries and did not know Molly was home, or she did not have the energy to respond. Molly walked on shaky legs past the piano, over the green carpet, by the useless mantel with the thick painted canvas above. It was like some big awful dinner party, the worst possible family gathering, and she had to face it without Carl. She needed a joke—that was it—someone who would not take all this quite so seriously.
Two strangers stood close to Belle, one with a plate of cookies, one with a coffee cup, and Belle’s hands were in her lap, clenched. She wore a black dress, and her head was uncovered, and there were no pearls, no jewelry around her neck.
“Do you hate me?” she asked without rising when Molly came near.
“It’s all right,” said the stranger who held the coffee cup. He was tall and clean-shaven, with sad eyes and abundant folds under his chin. On his head he wore a blue yarmulke.
“You know it’s my fault,” said Belle. “I killed him.”
“Sometimes in these cases,” said the tall man with the yarmulke, “it is easier to blame oneself than to face the enormity of the loss.” His tired, patient eyes peered down at Molly. “My name is Isaac Josephson.”
“He’s a rabbi,” said Belle. “And if he offers another cookie, I’m liable to kill someone. Get that man away from me.”
Embarrassed, Rabbi Josephson bent his tragic head.
Behind the chair on which Belle sat was a radiator, and behind the radiator a window. The sky was dark and the lights in the park glowed. No trains stirred below and the traffic on the drive was sparse. A barge moved upriver, a tugboat pushing in its wake. The New Jersey cliffs were invisible, but here and there in the woods above a lighted window glowed.
Molly reached a hand out to her mother, and then Belle grabbed both Molly’s arms. Her grip was ferocious, dug like claws into Molly’s forearms, and she drew her daughter near. Her head went right into Molly’s belly and she let out a cry, wrenching grief, and the room around went temporarily silent. Molly held her mother, not knowing what to do. She glanced backward at the crowd, all of whom stared. She felt like an idiot, thrust onstage, stumbling.
An hour later Lyden arrived. He had taken a train, then a ferry, then a taxicab, a three-legged journey from Princeton. His face had changed since Molly had last seen him, maybe a year and a half before. He wore round tortoiseshell glasses now, and his nose had been broken in a boxing match. He boxed varsity, middleweight, ranked second in the Ivy League. The nose was flatter, no longer aristocratic, and it listed toward the left.
Neither glasses nor nose made Lyden handsome, but both gave his face an inquiring, owlish, ironic look, reminiscent of his father’s, and contradictory somehow to both his ferocity and his shyness. He did not take off his coat or his scarf when he came into the Goodmans’. He kissed Belle, he embraced Abe, he answered his mother and father’s questions, but he kept his wild-eyed expression until he found Molly. He rushed past the other mourners, nodding at the ones he recognized.
She was in the dining room and hadn’t heard of his arrival. She was talking to someone about something—she would never again be sure to whom or about what—when he came through the French doors, long coat flapping. Lyden looked to her like a stranger at first. He reminded her somehow of her brother or some other handsome man. Then she saw the glasses, the broken nose. Whatever canapé had been in her fingers was gone.
He leapt toward her, grabbed her. His coat, tie, and face were cold from the windiness and the outside, but his body warmed her and something in Molly broke. She found not solace in his arms, but recognition. It was as if it had been Lyden she had been looking for in the corners of rooms, Lyden and not her brother. Molly bawled.
Neither said a word. The tears racked her convulsively, and if Lyden had not been there to hold her, she would have fallen.
Why Lyden? Strange that he had been the one she cried to, she thought later that night, so strange also to sleep in her own bedroom. The animals at the foot of the bed shocked her. The books were all aligned and alphabetized, the writing desk looked like a girl’s. These were the possessions of someone immensely more optimistic than Molly could imagine she had ever been, and more innocent. In her months away at college Molly was in the business of acquiring sophistication. Lyden Silver, she told herself—how odd, how inappropriate. When he had let her go from that crazy embrace she had nothing to say. And he had been his usual awkward self upon departure, looking down at the ground while their parents exchanged embraces, playing with the buttons of his coat. But when the elevator arrived he had burst out with it.
“Whatever you need, Molly.”
And there was another sentence, she was sure, but he did not manage to say it.
“Oh, I’ll be all right,” she said, and then winced at her lapse in grieving.
But she did feel all right, particularly before and after her cry with Lyden—light-headed, abstracted from her conversations, from everything, but all in all herself, if only lightly tethered to reality, almost as if she had been performing grief when she had sobbed in Lyden’s arms, her body doing something at once appropriate and not at all so (hadn’t it been her father or mother she ought to have cried with?), her mind floating up near the ceiling. She was not sure she felt it yet, or if she did feel it—the immensity of her loss, how much she had loved her brother—she did not know what it felt like.
The elevator rose in its shaft and she heard the gears clanking. A train passed down by the river and stray dogs barked. The pipes on either side of her bedroom clanked. Toilets flushed, water ran.
Molly was not herself in this bed, which held the strange familiar smells of childhood.
She crept down the narrow hall to Carl’s room, where the blinds were drawn and the mirror covered. On his dresser top were his hairbrushes and razors, the metal and polished silver glinting. Streetlights from below kept the room from total darkness. On his desk, she saw the outline of the typewriter and his dictionary. A bottle of ink shone. His high school diploma hung near the books; its glass cover reflected a square of light—a reflection of someone’s window across the way. On the dark wooden shelves, the works were kept in an odd semi-chronological order of interest. Molly touched them: the Conan Doyle, Collins, and Scott, the Freud and Marx that lately he had been struggling with. In his closets were tennis rackets and suits and on the top shelves boxes of magic.
She sat on Carl’s bed, turned on his reading lamp—something she never would have done while he was living—and looked at the one photograph he kept on his night table, a funny picture of himself and his sister at Coney Island, the summer before last. They were posed in straw hats, a weight lifter on the sand behind them.
Across, on the wall by the door to the room, there was a poster advertising a performance by Houdini, a gift that the Silvers had brought back from England seven years ago and that Abe as an indulgence to his son had had framed. The master of escape was nude, chained, and padlocked, and he faced forward comfortably. Strangely beautiful, he almost resembled Carl—his face was broader and more mature but to Molly’s eyes no more confident or powerful or handsome. Molly stared at Houdini, as if she might find comfort there.
Her father had disavowed all personal involvement in sorrow—grief was one of those things like courtesy, like good manners, that Abe Goodman would never claim as his own. And her mother was moaning about how it was her fault—taking this awful wrenching rift in Molly’s life and in one crazy, self-pitying swoop claiming all that sadness as her own: “I killed my son”—if grief were a hand of poker, Belle had dealt herself a royal flush. Molly had no language for loss, no experience, and no one to teach her. At school, she admired the tough girls, the ones who smoked and drank, who played with irony and swagger that was useless here. She fell back on Carl’s bed, hair all around her, and as she stared at Houdini’s face lapsed into sleep.
Sadness and death and exhaustion, how could you joke about that? Those clever Vassar College girls, they would clasp her in irons, wrap her in chains, sack her, box her, and toss her to the bottom of a river. She imagined what it would be like on the way down, soft and pleasurable, like going to sleep, all that cold water seeping in. Molly shut her eyes to feel how the water would flood the box, soak the sack, and give new weight to the chains. It would fill her nostrils and lungs, or, if she were like Houdini, she could slide right out. There would be a choice when the box hit the silt at the bottom of the river. Death or life, the magician could do as he pleased. And at the side of her box, Carl would be knocking.
Molly’s breathing deepened. She began to snore. The box side opened and underwater there he was.
“Hello, Mol.”
Carl would extend an arm, and she would reach back, right out of her chains.
SHE WOKE up on his bed feeling close to her brother, and she carried that secret closeness with her to the dining room. All through the coffee and leftover pastries, the three papers that the doorman brought up, she knew Carl was hovering close by. He rode with her to Poughkeepsie. At night he hovered over her dorm-room bed. Silent, illicit, Carl helped her. He found her shoes when she lost them. He came to her aid when she was faced with difficult exam questions. He consoled her when she felt all alone. But this was something that Molly told no one.
In her last year at school, she fell for a girl named Sukey Van Siever, who took Molly on as a pet. Up on the roof of a dormitory past midnight, Sukey taught Molly to smoke. She sang out new poetry. Long, blond, and milk-white, Sukey had a profile like a crescent moon’s. She wore her hair short like a boy’s, with a stylish flip, and at her urging Molly bobbed her curls. Sukey was rich, led a set of girls whom money allowed to be modern and shocking. They talked of Eliot and petting and jazz, whether or not they liked the poems or kissed many boys—and none of them had been to Harlem. In springtime they rode in a chauffeured car, and Molly sipped whiskey from a flask. Clubby and illegal, the girls laughed on their way to a dance. Molly kissed a boy there, worried he would taste the liquor on her, and a second one, Arnold Greenbaum, at a party the Silvers threw to raise money for deported Reds, but she had never opened her lips to anyone until after graduation, when she went to visit Sukey’s Aunt Luna’s summerhouse in Newport. The girls walked together on a beach, and alone on a quiet dune after sundown they experimented, touching tongues. It was secret as the cigarettes and funny as the booze, it was safe and fun and they knew that they were shocking. Sukey had kissed other girls, she confessed, but she was madly in love with Molly. The two of them laughed.
August 1922. She was going to work, she was going to be independent. Her father offered Molly a job at Progress, but she pushed that aside for lower-paying work at a new tabloid, the New York Radio Times, whose slogan went: “Tomorrow’s News Today.” Molly rented a room in a Greenwich Village walk-up on Gay Street, where the last of the neighborhood Negroes lived. The bathroom was in the hall, and there was a painter, Pignoli, who used the tub to wash his terrier, Goldman. She was bohemian, professional, hard as nails, and even her father’s socialism seemed quaint.
Still and all, at night when the streetlights and headlights slung shapes and shadows on her ceiling, Molly lay in her soft single bed and sought out spirits. Nothing she would ever admit to anyone she knew, but she dragged her old butterfly net out of the closet of her imagination and swung it around the room—the folded dressing shade, the photographs pinned to the wall, the books on the shelf (Ulysses, first twenty-seven pages cut), the worn armchair, the table with candlesticks, salt and pepper and typewriter and telephone, the gas ring, the coffee percolator, the bottle of bonded whiskey.
Only when she knew she had reached Carl, connected with him, and in this way prayed, could Molly sleep. Then she would get up in the morning to hear the elevated train on Sixth Avenue, the honking horns, and the manic street life of New York—no place out there for a girl who believed in ghosts.