I COULD HAVE SAVED MY DAUGHTER’S LIFE IF I’D BEEN AT that corner a minute earlier. I didn’t dawdle in the drugstore, and the man wasn’t slow. At least I don’t have to grow old thinking that if I hadn’t stopped to look at nail polish, I’d have saved her life. I didn’t stop to look at nail polish. No one saw Racket climb out of the stroller, walk to the curb, and step off except an old woman crossing the street toward her, who screamed but couldn’t reach her in time—but when I got there, people were everywhere. I remember light, blinding light, but I don’t know where it came from. It must have taken some time for an ambulance to come.
Everyone knew everything within an instant, it seemed—the policeman, the man who was driving the car, all the people gathered on the corner. Half of what they knew was wrong, but the rush of what they thought made it impossible to say. Everyone knew she was my child, and that I had left her outside the store. Pearl rushed out of the store just as I came along—as we all came along—as the man, who had leaped from his car, and the old woman collided with each other, reaching for my dead baby. In the light and screaming, Pearl took Simon’s carriage and I received the angry comfort of strangers. Pearl was crying too hard to speak, and I don’t think she thought about what everyone was assuming. By the time the policeman got around to asking me questions and writing down answers, which was at the hospital, where Nathan rushed in, looking like an old man, I had settled on the story everyone expected to hear: I had gone into the grocery store and left the stroller outside.
I could have done it. All my wishes and what little energy I had after the bronchitis, all afternoon, had been spent trying to put Racket to sleep, and once she was asleep, I too might well have just left her. Always before, when she fell asleep after crying for a long time—when she was exhausted—nothing could waken her. I’ve asked myself many times whether I would have left the stroller alone, and I think I might have. Over the years, when I’ve heard about other mothers who lost their children after a moment’s inattention or neglect, I’ve felt sympathy, not outrage, as if I truly was the one who did it. Maybe I was.
As I was talking to the policeman, a nurse came in and quietly handed me Racket’s shoes. They were leather shoes, not booties, because she walked so early. They weren’t even new, or recently polished—just dirty white baby shoes with laces losing their tips. I kept them. I held on to them all that evening, although Nathan tried to put them away.
That night, as I stood there holding those shoes, I believe I thought that if I told anyone it was Pearl who left the baby alone, she would have been prosecuted for murder. I don’t know why I thought that; I was in turmoil, of course. With my baby dead, I wanted to die, and if someone was going to be prosecuted for murder, it seemed best that I be the one. Pearl had Simon to care for. I knew that there was another reason to go along with everyone’s mistake. I knew it was better if Nathan thought that I, and not Pearl, had let Racket die, but I didn’t think that through for a long time.
My mother-in-law sat shiva at my house. I don’t know if Nathan and I would have done it otherwise. We never went to synagogue and I didn’t know the rules for mourning. For a week, we sat on low benches that the funeral home had lent us. I remember my mother-in-law sitting there, solid and square, rocking and sobbing, then suddenly stiffening and screaming as if she was the old woman who saw Racket hit, or as if the car had hit her. Pearl and I had never called our mother-in-law Mama, but now we did. Pearl and Mike were with us most of the time. Mama screamed for Simon, her remaining grandchild, and when he was brought to her it seemed to comfort her a little. She held him on her lap and rocked forward, pressing him between her breasts and her lap. He lay still and let her as her granddaughter never had.
“It was my fault,” said Pearl, in terror, the first time we were alone.
“I don’t want you to talk about that,” I said firmly, and she obeyed. I had forgotten about her and Nathan, I noticed at one point. It hardly mattered, considering what had happened. They were formal with each other, as if they didn’t know each other very well, as if they were the only two of us without a reason to be close—for I’d always been at ease with Mike, and it seemed that Pearl and I could never push the thought of the other completely aside. Sometimes I thought that maybe they didn’t know each other very well, maybe what had brought them together was formality, unfamiliarity, mystery.
Mike cooked. He spoke little, and never managed to offer condolences, though he said, “Hilda, Hilda,” to me, over and over again. Every day he cooked supper for us, then led Pearl and Simon off to their apartment as Nathan and his mother and I sat down to eat. Mike could make canned soup with cheese sandwiches, French toast, or hamburgers with baked potatoes and canned peas. We had those three meals in order for many days, until finally I told him I could go back to cooking, and Mrs. Levenson stopped staying at our house all day and even overnight.
We’d had Racket for only a year and three months, but it was impossible to remember how to live without her, or to start that life up again. After Mike and Pearl had gone back to their regular life and Nathan was teaching again, I was alone in the apartment all day. There were days when I would lie on the couch in the living room, and it seemed that there was no reason for me to have legs except to go into the bedroom to pick up Racket, no reason to have arms except to hold her. I could remember the exact feel of her weight, her restlessness. My arms would ache so hard for her that I would rub them and sob, rub them and sob, until the slipcover was soaked. Then on other days it was anger that gripped me. I had told Pearl that Racket had learned to climb out of the stroller. I had told Pearl, and she had seen Racket climb out, but she had not remembered, or not thought it mattered, or not cared about Racket the way she’d have cared about her own child. Sometimes my jaw worked as I lay face down on the couch, sobbing, and I wanted to bite Pearl.
One day, two or three weeks after Racket had died, I thought I was feeling a little better, and I took a shower and put on clean clothes. I began to think about Pearl, and although she had been humble and scared the whole week after Racket’s death, as if she too thought she was going to be prosecuted for murder, I thought of her as uncaring and indifferent. Of course I knew she couldn’t mind as much as I did, and it made me angry that the world did not mourn my child as I did, but had gone on without a pause, except that the old woman who’d seen her die had come by one day with Italian cakes and tears, and the wife of the man who’d been driving the car called me and told me her husband cried at night.
I was angry with Pearl, and I thought my anger was merely going to propel me out, maybe into the park. It would be good for me to go for a walk, just a short walk in the cold air, and then I could stop at the store and buy bread for breakfast and a few other things. I had not done any shopping since that day. Mike or Nathan had done it all.
But I walked straight to Pearl’s house. I hoped she was not going to be there, although as I walked along, with tears not quite shed, feeling like someone in a play, playing the part of a woman walking along a street, I also did want her to be there. When I reached her building, I ran up the stairs. I felt strong. It didn’t make me lose my breath to run. When Pearl opened the door, I stepped in, and to my own surprise I began hitting her. “I came over,” I said, but as I was speaking, I was swinging my arm in my coat and glove, reaching up at her face. She stood there, shocked, looking down at me. I slapped her, not hard, because something was making my arm heavy so that I could hardly move it, and I couldn’t get any force behind it. The air pressed it back. But after I slapped her I began pummeling at her face and pummeling with my other hand—my pocketbook slid off my wrist—at her arm and her body.
“Hilda,” she said, and closed the door behind me. I could hear Simon crying somewhere. Pearl didn’t try to stop me. At first my blows were like a baby’s, weak, but then my strength returned and I hit her sides and back. I threw myself at her and hit her shoulders and legs. She backed up and somehow I pushed her down. I was ashamed, but I couldn’t stop. I was sobbing and beating my sister-in-law, still in my gloves, but as hard as I could now, beating her sides and buttocks and legs. I bit her arm through her blouse. I was on top of her.
I could feel her stir at last—it took a long time—and finally she made a pass at my wrists, and then she put both her hands on my wrists and held tight. I felt relief, as if I wanted to be stopped. She held my wrists and I sobbed against her breasts. We were both lying on the floor, on our sides now, sobbing. At last I felt Pearl, who was stronger and bigger than I, release my wrists and put her arms around me, drawing me closer to her. My stockings were torn and I had heard something else rip. I think my heel had got caught in the hem of my skirt.
At last I sat up. Neither of us spoke for a long time. We were both out of breath. “Go and wash,” Pearl said at last.
I took off my coat and my gloves. The fingers of my gloves were split. I went into the bathroom and washed my face and hands and combed my hair. When I came out, Pearl was sitting in the living room nursing Simon, her blouse unbuttoned, a diaper thrown over her shoulder for modesty. Her hair was disheveled and there was a red mark on her cheek.
I sat down, ashamed.
“The hem of your skirt is hanging,” she said. “You’d better fix it. My sewing box is in the bedroom.”
I went for a needle and thread. Then I took off my skirt and sat down opposite her and hemmed it. Most of the hem was down.
“I haven’t told Mike I was the one who really did it,” said Pearl. “You told me not to talk about it.”
“I haven’t told Nathan,” I said.
“Why didn’t you say right away?” she said. “I thought everybody knew it was me, until later.”
“I was confused,” I said. “Then I wanted them to think I did it.”
“I shouldn’t have left her outside,” she said. “Everyone knows you can’t do that.”
“I know,” I said, “but I might have done it.”
“I don’t think so.”
“I don’t know what I would have done.”
She moved Simon to her other breast, but didn’t drape the diaper over her shoulder this time. “Nathan already hated me before,” she said, stroking Simon’s dark head. He was an industrious eater and he made a noise when he nursed. I hadn’t watched Pearl nurse him much. At our house she’d taken him into the bedroom.
“No, he doesn’t hate you,” I said. “He certainly doesn’t hate you.” But I thought that maybe he did. He’d hated himself since he’d gone to bed with Pearl, I knew that, and maybe he hated her, too.
Nathan had never asked me for a detailed explanation about Racket. He didn’t want to talk about what happened, or to talk about her. Pearl had gathered most of Racket’s clothes and removed them from the house, and Nathan had arranged with the super to store her crib in the basement. I’d put her shoes and a few other things away in a drawer. Already it was almost as if she had never been.
It took me a long time to hem the skirt. We didn’t say anything more. Pearl finished nursing Simon and he fell asleep. She sat and held him on her lap for a while, and then she stood up gracefully and carried him into the other room. I made myself watch her, not letting myself think all the obvious thoughts—how it could have been me carrying a baby into the other room, and so on. In fact it hardly ever was me, not that way. Getting Racket to sleep was always a battle. I never glided along with her the way Pearl did with Simon. I don’t glide, anyway.
Pearl had kept her hair short after she’d cut off her braid, and she looked young. Her neck looked long. I didn’t know whether Pearl would think I was crazy or be mad at me forever for hitting her, or whether she’d just be so embarrassed that it had happened—our lying on the floor crying and me hitting her, wearing my gloves and shoes—that it would be impossible even to talk. I felt meek, let me tell you, sitting there hemming that skirt under orders.
I heard Pearl go into the bathroom. She was in there a long time, and I realized she was taking off her makeup and putting it on again so she could cover the red marks. When she came out she was wearing a fresh blouse and her hair was combed and her face looked nice. She sat down next to me. “I’d give anything to bring Rachel back,” she said. “I hope you know that.”
“You wouldn’t give Simon,” I said cruelly. I was angry because she’d said Rachel. She hadn’t called Racket Rachel for months.
“No,” she said, and stood up and went into the kitchen. Finally I finished hemming the skirt and I put it on. I followed Pearl into the kitchen. I think I wanted to see whether she would point out how unnecessary that last remark had been. I remembered the way it had felt when she held my wrists to keep me from hitting her any longer, and I think I wanted to see whether she’d do something like that again. But she didn’t say anything. She was washing her lunch dishes. I went and put on my coat and took my ruined gloves and my purse and let myself out of the apartment.
After that when I felt like going out I didn’t go to Pearl’s house. I walked. Sometimes I’d meet a neighbor, and she’d bend her head and speak to me inaudibly. “I beg your pardon?” I’d say, but nobody ever said anything to me that I could hear.
I had very little to do. I read many library books. Sometimes I read a whole book in a day, and later it would be hard to remember that I didn’t live in those characters’ lives. I never forgot about Racket, though, even while I was reading. Her death was always there.
That winter, the Loyalists were doing badly in Spain, and the American volunteers were retreating with the rest of them. Nathan went to meeting after meeting, and came home shaking his head, saying little. It seemed to be the only thing that could distract him, hearing about the troubles in Spain, hearing people give speeches about Marxism, about economic justice, about the Soviet Union. He read a lot, too—difficult books about economic theory. I wondered how he could pay attention, but I think the books helped him, the way a different man might have been helped by climbing a steep mountain or swimming miles.
Once or twice I went to a meeting with him. I was not tempted to go more often, though the meetings were more interesting than I expected. Nathan said less than he had before about his political opinions. He said less than he had before about everything. We hardly ever spoke. When I think of that winter, I remember silence and grayness. One day Nathan told me he’d heard that Ruby’s boyfriend, Billy, had been wounded at Teruel. He didn’t know how badly, or where Billy was. He knew a friend of Billy’s, and had run into him handing out leaflets.
The next day I called Pearl. She’d seen Ruby. “Ruby wants to visit you,” she said.
“Why?”
“She feels bad about Racket.”
“She has better things to do.”
“Hilda, why do you talk like that?” said Pearl.
“I don’t talk like that.”
Pearl went back to talking about Ruby and Billy. Billy had been wounded in the hip. His hip had been shattered, but he was alive. Ruby was happy that he was alive, but worried about him. He was still in Spain. She didn’t know much.
“Tell Ruby she can come see me,” I said.
Ruby came a week later. “That sweet baby,” she said as soon as she walked in. “I couldn’t believe it when I heard about that sweet baby.”
“Thank you,” I said. I made coffee for her. I got her to talk about Billy. Billy had had to walk across the Pyrenees. He liked the Spanish people. He’d stamped on grapes with Spanish peasants in the Guadarrama mountains.
“His letters aren’t really unhappy,” she said, “but he keeps writing about men who died. I’m supposed to visit their mothers. He sends me their names. Not the names of the mothers, thank goodness. He wants me to look in the phone book and see if I can figure out who the relatives are and go visit them. Can you imagine?”
I shook my head.
“It would be so hard,” said Ruby. “I don’t know if they’d want me to come. I didn’t know if you wanted me to, and we’d met before.”
“It was nice of you to come,” I said. It might have been the first friendly thing I’d said to anybody since Racket died. She had died on November 19, 1937, and this was probably late February or early March. That’s a long time to go without saying anything nice. It made me like Ruby, because I’d said something pleasant to her, that little lie. Of course I hadn’t wanted her to come, any more than the grieving mothers of the boys lost in Spain would. I tried to figure out whether their pain would be worse than mine, whether it made it better or worse that your child had lived for years and you’d gotten to know him, whether it made it better or worse that he’d died for a good cause instead of in a stupid accident. I imagined Ruby going from house to house, making the grieving mothers lie about wanting her to come, and making them feel better because they’d been nice to somebody, dopey little Ruby who still looked about fourteen—well, maybe by now she looked sixteen—and the thought of it seemed funny.
Then I realized that nothing whatever had seemed funny since the day Racket had died. I kept talking to Ruby—”Are you able to write to Billy?” I asked, and she said she kept writing but she didn’t know if he always got the letters. She had her hat on her lap and she kept turning it around and around, a little wool hat. But I was thinking different thoughts: I was trying to remember something funny from the months that had passed since November, something funny in the papers or on the radio. We still listened to the radio now and then, and I remembered that we used to laugh at many of the programs, but now I couldn’t recall anything funny at all. I suppose we’d stopped listening to the funny programs without even talking about it.
It really wasn’t a funny year. Even in the worst parts of the Depression, funny things happened, silly things, just because everyone was so poor. I remember my father offering me his old socks, thinking there must be some use to them when they couldn’t be darned any longer, hating to throw them away, and how I’d laughed to think of a time in which a gift from a father to a daughter was used socks. I’d taken them, too. I used them for dust rags or something.
But 1938 wasn’t a funny year. Maybe people who didn’t lose a baby found something to laugh at, but Nathan and I didn’t. I wondered whether he laughed at school. Being with young people—now there had to be funny moments there. Now I was really grateful to Ruby for coming. She had made me think. I gave her more coffee and then she left.
That night I asked Nathan whether anything funny ever happened in his school. He looked out from under his eyebrows at me. He stared as if he had trouble seeing me, and I wondered whether he’d wept away his eyesight. Later it did turn out that he needed glasses. But then it seemed as if he was looking at me through fog and smoke. “Yes,” he said. “There’s a little girl. Evelyn Grossman. She’s very funny. She’s a natural comedienne.”
“Do you laugh?”
“I laugh.” He was reading the paper, and he looked down at it again. Then he looked up. “You think I shouldn’t laugh?”
“No,” I said. “I’m glad there’s something to laugh at. Tell me something she said.”
But he couldn’t remember. “Maybe you need to get out of the house,” he said.
I thought that was true, and I began to think about getting a job. I’d thought about it right away, right after Racket died, when I realized how little there was for me to do at home. But I’d buy the paper and forget to read the want ads, or I’d sit down to read them without a pencil, and be so tired—from nothing—that I couldn’t stand up and go for a pencil to circle the promising ones. Then when I finally had some numbers to call, so much time had passed that I was sure those jobs had been filled.
Now I began to think about a job. They were easier to find than when I got the job at Bobbie’s. I didn’t want to go back there. Everyone would talk about Racket. I wanted to take a job with strangers, and not tell them I ever had a baby. The only way I could get better was to let events cover her up. I began to know that I wouldn’t always feel as bad as I felt then. For a while I’d thought I’d feel the same way for my whole life. But when I thought about the mothers who had lost sons in Spain, I thought that maybe in ten years those women would feel a little better—and then it occurred to me that maybe I’d feel better in ten years, too.
I decided I wanted to work in a store. It would be simple. Somebody wants shoes, you give her shoes, she gives you money, you put it in the till. I could be nice to people without too much trouble. I thought about all this for a few days, and then I dressed up a little and took the subway into New York and went to the big department stores—Lord & Taylor’s, Altman’s, Saks. I got a job at Macy’s, which pleased me because it was the biggest even though it wasn’t the fanciest. I wanted to be on the first floor where the crowds swirled around, but after I’d filled out an application and taken an arithmetic test and been trained for two days, they put me in Misses’ Sportswear. I liked the training. Someone had figured out everything and all I had to do was learn it. There was a procedure when a package was to be sent, a procedure for everything. I had to put the number of the department in a box, the date in another box. Each time I learned a new procedure, it made me feel better.
When I got out on the floor, it was harder than I expected. I had to stand all day, and the first day there, I wore holes in my shoes. I went home and soaked my feet. They were red and blistered. Nathan was shocked.
I made mistakes at work, and then tears would come to my eyes, as if I’d simply reached my limit in hard things before I got to that store. Making a mistake and having to get permission to void a sale and start over, I cried, but I didn’t let the woman in charge see me. Sometimes I just had to count things—skirts on a rack, or blouses folded on a shelf. I liked that. I couldn’t possibly do harm to anyone, counting skirts. After all, Pearl had left Racket outside that store, but I’d let Pearl push Racket’s stroller.
I liked being able to help people. One customer didn’t speak English. I don’t know what language she was speaking, maybe Italian or Spanish. I kept smiling at her, and she smiled back and patted my arm. Finally I patted her arm. We got to be great friends. She went into the fitting room and I brought her skirts until she found one she liked. She could let me know what she liked and didn’t like, and I smiled and even clapped my hands. We rejoiced together. She had a wedding ring on. I wondered whether she also had had a baby who died. It could be true. She was in her thirties, and there were no children with her. Not speaking each other’s language, we didn’t have to talk about these dead children. We were able to rub cloth between our fingers and pantomime how much we liked the cut of the skirts.
It was good to be bringing money home again. I’d thought money didn’t matter, even though Nathan didn’t make much, but with money we had possibilities. I used my employee discount to buy a new chair for the living room. It was the color of mustard, with a fringe on the bottom. When the chair was delivered, I looked at it, and thought that it had nothing to do with Racket, it was a place where she had never been. It made me know we had to move, and after a few months, I began looking for another apartment. I walked up and down the streets on Sundays, looking for signs in windows advertising apartments for rent. At last I found one, just a few blocks away from our old apartment, but far enough to have different neighbors who didn’t know us. It was similar to our old apartment, a little bigger—but it felt different. You turned to the right when you walked in the front door, instead of to the left. Moving out, I felt as if I was leaving behind my daughter, who was buried under the floorboards. I felt worse than I had expected to feel. She had been dead for almost a year by then.
It was after Nathan’s disillusionment with the Communists. I had found him slumped over, one day, listening to the radio. Stalin had signed a nonaggression pact with Hitler. Nathan continued to go to meetings for a while after that, and some of his friends tried to reassure him. They said that Stalin knew what he was doing, that he should trust Stalin—but he couldn’t. Once I found him crying. After a while he stopped going to meetings. Then we moved, and we were busy in the apartment. We had to buy new things. I shortened our old living room curtains and put them in the bedroom, and bought new drapes for the living room.
At work I was moved to the first floor and sold pocketbooks. I watched the crowd and marveled that I didn’t know any of these people. Sometimes elegant women in suits and dark hats walked by, talking to their friends, looking like characters from a play about the upper classes. Once a line of schoolgirls in uniform marched past me, speaking French. I had no idea who they were or how they’d got there. It was easier to sell purses than sportswear—I didn’t have to walk around so much. And it was one more move away from my old self, not just the self who still had a daughter, but even the newly bereaved self who cried when she made a mistake.
Now I chatted with customers and directed people who were lost. I could even direct people to the baby clothes department. It was good that there were still babies. Maybe someday I’d have another one. The first time someone asked me the way to baby clothes—not a mother or a grandmother but a man in a fedora—I watched myself to see if the question would break me, but I was all right.
I liked giving directions. I wanted to help people even more, and during the slow times, when I was supposed to look busy, rearranging and straightening the stock, I planned what I’d do if someone took sick and collapsed near my counter, how I’d rush around to catch her under the arms and lower her carefully to the floor. I didn’t make friends, or at least, I didn’t go beyond a certain point with the friends I did make. I liked my work friends. Sometimes I worked side by side with a woman for a long time and never learned her first name. I was Mrs. Levenson and she was Miss Bradley or whatever. I had friends with whom I’d never sat down, whom I’d never seen seated. We would talk, of course, when things were slow, but often about the store. The other women told me about the departments where they had worked, the advantages and drawbacks of each one.
This may seem cold but it was not cold. With each month that passed I felt stronger. Sometimes I let myself remember good times I’d had with Racket, rocking her or playing with her. When she was alive I hadn’t thought of myself as a good mother, but now I could see that I’d been a good mother. I’d loved her. I never learned how to make her stop crying, but I was on her side. I got angry when she cried, but not at her—angry at the setup that made us strangers. I wondered what she would have been like if she’d lived. She had just been starting to speak a few words, but of course they didn’t really sound like someone talking.
Nathan and I didn’t talk about her. Losing her had brought him closer to Pearl and Mike, though—or at least closer to Simon. He was stiff and formal with Pearl, stiff and subdued with Mike, and I thought he was afraid, after Stalin had signed the pact with Hitler, that Mike’s main subject from then on was going to be “I told you so.” And of course, being Mike, he couldn’t help but give us some of that. “I don’t suppose you’re surprised?” he said.
“Yes, I’m surprised, Michael,” said Nathan.
“I could have told you.”
“You could have told me Stalin was going to sign an agreement with the Nazis? If Stalin is on the side of the Nazis, why did he go to all that trouble in Spain?”
“Beats me,” said Mike. “I never thought any of those guys had any brains.”
“Some people think it’s a trick.”
“And you?”
“I’m not a tricky person, Michael.”
“Oh, yeah?”
This was in the lobby of the hospital, of all places. Mrs. Levenson was in the hospital. She’d always had a bad heart, and now it was worse. We had met at her bedside. Now we were leaving together.
“So where’s Simon?” Nathan said, changing the subject. He needed Simon. I’d been afraid Simon would be too much of a reminder, but Simon was everybody’s comfort. He was a quiet, bright little boy. He’d run to Nathan and beg to be picked up and swung in the air. Nathan didn’t swing too hard or too high and that was what Simon liked.
“He won’t let me do it,” Mike had said, the first time Nathan had played this way with Simon. “He cries when I do it.”
“You’re rough with him,” said Pearl. “It scares him.”
“Who’s rough? I’m not rough.”
Now Pearl offered us a ride home with them. We still didn’t have a car. She suggested that we stop at their house to see Simon. He’d been left with a neighbor. All the way home, we talked about the coming war. We were all watching it come, those months. I couldn’t remember ever thinking so much about faraway places, even though I was married to Nathan and we’d always talked about politics and current events. Now it was hard to remember that anything else mattered except Hitler being handed Czechoslovakia and marching into Poland. But at least it gave the four of us something to talk about that didn’t make anybody run and hide. Pearl was the most upset, to my surprise, the most insistent that Roosevelt should bring our country into it.
“What if there’s a draft?” I said. “What if Mike has to go?”
“Nathan could go, too,” she said.
“Well, yes, I suppose so.” Nathan was wearing glasses by now. He’d finally had his eyes checked, and it turned out his vision was very poor. “You are a menace, Mr. Levenson,” the eye doctor had said in a friendly way. “It’s not safe to have you moving among us without glasses.” I didn’t think the army would want somebody like that.
“I don’t want Mike to have to go,” Pearl said now. “Don’t think that. For God’s sake. But Hitler’s going to take over the world if we’re not careful.” She had brought Simon home from the neighbor’s and was taking off his coat. She seized him and kissed him as if Hitler were coming up the stairs. Simon ran to Nathan as soon as he was freed and squeezed between his knees. “Want up,” he said.
Nathan began to play with him. I saw Pearl watch them with a light in her eyes, and I wondered whether she still thought about Nathan, was even still in love with him, or whether it was Simon she was thinking about now. She was standing in the doorway, about to carry Simon’s jacket to wherever she kept it, but standing still, she turned back, looking quite young and unaware of herself or of me looking at her. I was sitting in the chair where I’d hemmed my skirt after I beat her up, after Racket died. It seemed like a long time ago. Simon had been an infant, but babies grow into children quickly. Looking at Pearl, I felt something rather sweet and new come over me—despite all the fear and misery of worrying about war, which seemed to have replaced my grief, or to have gathered my sorrow into it. I forgave Pearl, that was what it was. I was embarrassed when the word came into my head. It didn’t seem like something modern people did, forgiving. I wished I could say it, but I knew I wouldn’t, certainly not in front of the men. I would have stood and touched her shoulder and said, “Pearl, I forgive you.” Of course the men would have thought I meant something else.
Whenever I saw Nathan’s mother, for two years, she wailed. She never stopped rocking back and forth. She never quite stood up straight after the death of her granddaughter. She’d ask, “Why didn’t God take me instead? Why not me?”
I’d get angry with her. “How should I know?” I’d say to her.
Then when she had gone, I’d cry and ask Nathan, “Why does she do that to me?”
“She doesn’t mean to upset you.”
“Then why does she bring it up over and over? How should I know why God took the baby instead of her?”
“She doesn’t really think you’ll answer her.”
“I don’t know what to say when she asks that.”
“I know.”
Of course the suggestion made me angry because I’d have been delighted to give her to God instead of my child. It wasn’t as if God had suggested the exchange and I had refused. I couldn’t agree with her out loud, though.
But it also angered me because it was too flattering to her. If such a thing were possible, if there was a God and He needed a certain number of us to keep up the troops in heaven, I knew that this grumpy old lady would never make a suitable substitute for my lively daughter. But I didn’t believe in anything like that—I couldn’t comfort myself with the picture of Racket wriggling for God in heaven.
“Leave me alone,” I shouted at her once. “It’s harder for me than for you.”
I thought she’d be angry with me forever, but she only shouted, “Of course harder for you. Who said not harder for you? God forbid I should think not harder for you.”
Then suddenly one day she died of heart failure. Mostly we were surprised. She wasn’t particularly old and although she had been in the hospital twice, she didn’t act sick. She would clutch her chest when she came upstairs, and we wouldn’t have handed her a heavy package to hold, but we assumed she’d go on that way for a long time. When she died I thought that at least she would no longer come into my living room and wail, and I wondered whether she had died of a broken heart.
God didn’t give Racket back even though He had now decided He could use Mrs. Levenson after all. He must have wanted them both. “So send her back!” I found myself shouting at my dead mother-in-law one afternoon when I was alone in the apartment, my arms in the dishpan full of suds.
“I should have screamed with her,” I said to Pearl one day.
“About Racket?”
“Yes. Remember how she used to scream?”
“Of course. I don’t think it made her feel any better.”
“I don’t know,” I said. It occurred to me now that I might have asked Mrs. Levenson whether she wanted me to answer her question about God. “What do you mean, answer?” she’d have said. “How should I know from answer?”
“I’m sorry she died,” I said to Pearl.
“Me, too,” she said. “I think I mind more than Mike does.”
“Nathan minds,” I said.
“Maybe Mike does too,” said Pearl. “It’s hard to know what Mike really thinks.” We were in the playground where we’d sometimes met before. It was a Sunday, and I’d gone over to her house with a knitting pattern she had wanted to borrow. It was the summer of 1940 and Racket had been dead for two and a half years. Simon was three. When I’d reached Pearl’s house, she was about to take him to the playground, and she asked, a little hesitantly, if I wanted to go along. Mike stood by sullenly and watched us talk. I didn’t know if something particular was bothering him or not.
“Mike is like a boy,” I said now, while we watched Simon play. I pictured Mike zipping up his jacket and tucking his face down, putting his hands in his pockets the way boys do. Even when he wore a topcoat and a hat instead of a cap he kept his head down, looking at the ground and whistling. “He whistles,” I said.
“Yes,” Pearl said. “Boys whistle.”
“There are things he doesn’t seem to talk about,” I went on. I wondered if he ever talked about Pearl and Nathan. Well, we didn’t; why should he? But I thought he thought about it. He spoke to Simon as if it was in his mind.
I suppose Pearl thought it would still be painful for me to go to the playground, but it wasn’t. I’m not made like that. Or everything was painful. Once, the summer after Racket died, I’d gone and sat in that same playground, the unpaved one with the trees, the one we’d liked. It was late in the evening, almost dark, and no one was there. I cried quite a bit there, but I cried quite a bit everywhere that year.
As we talked, Pearl stood next to the slide, and whenever Simon reached the top and started down, she would go over and crouch, waiting to catch him. He hadn’t yet learned to put his feet down when he reached the bottom, and he was afraid to slide down unless she was there. When we left, Mike had said, “Don’t baby him, Pearlie.”
When I said there were things Mike didn’t talk about, Pearl didn’t answer because she had gone over to the bottom of the slide once again. She was wearing a dark green skirt and when she crouched, it touched the ground. She laughed at Simon, who was working up his courage at the top of the slide. “Should I come now, Mommy? Should I come now?” he called.
“Now would be fine, darling.”
“Would now be fine, too? How about this now?”
“This now would be fine, too.”
At last he came down, and she caught him and kissed him. She put him down and shook the gravel off her skirt.
“Mike thinks like someone in a room without doors or windows,” she said. “He just goes around and around.”
“So he never changes his mind?”
“Never,” said Pearl. “He never changes at all. No, that’s not true. He does change. He wears out a path on the floor and then things change. It’s different.”
“What’s different?”
“Well, the floor has a slope,” she said. We both laughed.
I looked up at the leafy trees. It was the time of summer when the leaves seem widest. I’ve always wondered whether they get narrower later. I looked up to see whether the trees were going to help me or whether I was going to be sorry for what I was about to say.
“Has he forgiven you for your—for that unpleasant experience with—”
“No, Hilda,” said Pearl. “It was very pleasant. It wasn’t unpleasant until later. Sorry.”
So she could talk about it more easily than I. Of all things. It silenced me for a minute. Simon had wandered off, watching a bird. Then I said, “I wanted to know whether Mike is still angry with you.”
“In a way he’ll always be angry,” she said, after a pause. “But he’s worn a place on the floor. Anger’s different when it’s a habit.”
“He’ll never understand it,” I said.
“Understand it?” Pearl’s voice was tremulous.
“The way I do, I guess,” I said.
We had moved to a bench and Pearl had taken out her knitting, but now it lay untouched in her lap. “So how do you understand it, Hilda?” she said, not looking at me.
I thought about it. “It was selfish,” I said.
“Yes.”
“On the part of both of you.”
“Yes.”
“But selfishness isn’t a capital crime,” I said. I turned on the bench to talk to Pearl, though I was also watching the trees behind her. The leaves moved a little, up and down. “I don’t want to spend my whole life listening to people apologizing to me,” I said. “It’s insulting.”
“How is it insulting?” She stared at me. “I don’t understand why it’s insulting.”
“I don’t either,” I said. Then I added, “It keeps you and me from knowing each other.”
“Catch me, Mommy,” Simon called now. “Catch me.’”
“I’ve thought about that,” she said to me, ignoring him, “but I thought it was mostly Racket.”
“Well, Racket, too,” I said. “Of course.”
“How could you like me?” she said.
“And if I hate you?” I said. “How am I better off?”
She shrugged and picked up her needles. “I don’t know how you’re better off, Hildie. Heaven knows I’m not better off if you hate me.”
“Catch me!” called Simon again, running past us. This time she stood up and ran over to where he was waiting and picked him up. Then she wiped his nose with a handkerchief she took from her skirt pocket. Then she decided it was time to go home for lunch, and we should pick up Simon’s toys. On the way home she talked about other things.
After a while we began to see each other all the time again. We’d have each other’s family to our houses for supper. The men were quiet, but they didn’t protest. Or we’d go shopping. Pearl bought a new winter coat that fall, and I went along to watch Simon in the stores while she tried coats on. Pearl was always hungry. I didn’t remember that from before. She was always suggesting that we stop at Schrafft’s or Child’s. We had pancakes at Child’s when we went shopping, or we went to the Automat for baked macaroni and cheese or tongue sandwiches. We usually went shopping on Saturdays. I’d been in the store at work all week, but I didn’t mind. We found things to laugh at, somehow, on those days.
Simon loved to put nickels in the machines at the Automat and be picked up to open the doors and take the food out. I remember how intently he worked the machines while I grasped his firm waist. Even though Racket had lived such a short time and had been dead for so long, it was always a surprise to me that Simon didn’t kick and struggle when I held him.
One day in the Automat we met Pearl’s old friend Ruby. She was married now, she told us. She still worked at Bobbie’s. Billy had mostly recovered from his injuries. “He walks stiffly,” she said. “He’s afraid it will keep him out of the army.”
“He wants to go again?”
“He still wants to fight Hitler. Billy thinks if he doesn’t get Hitler, nobody will.”
“So he thinks we’ll be at war soon?” I said.
“We should have been at war long ago,” said Ruby.
She had lost Pearl’s address and we all wrote down addresses. Then a week or so later I came home from work and heard voices in the living room, and it was Billy talking to Nathan. I was glad to see him. He’d grown up a lot. He had been like a child when we met him. I remembered him shyly standing in Pearl and Mike’s kitchen, trying to deal with so many strangers. Now he was more confident, but still quiet. He was telling Nathan how sorry he was about the death of Nathan’s mother. I wondered whether they had already talked about Racket. Of course they had, I thought. I walked into the room to say hello and to see whether Nathan had offered him anything to eat, and Billy stood up and came toward me. He lurched when he walked. He pumped my hand for a long time. Then he took my shoulders gently between his fingers and leaned forward to kiss my cheek, aiming the kiss very carefully. “Hilda,” he said.
“It’s good to see you,” I said. “Are you all right?”
“I’m fine,” he said. “You’re the one who’s had troubles.”
I went to bring a fruit bowl. He was talking eagerly to Nathan about his experiences, about the friendliness of people in Spain. Old women had kissed him and cried over him.
“The winter was rainy, yes?” said Nathan.
“Rain. Then heat. Oh, boy.”
I left them and went to start supper. After Billy left, Nathan followed me into the kitchen and stood watching me quietly. “Do you know what he said, Hilda?” he asked me. “He said Ruby wrote him about Rachel, and he dreamed about her for weeks.”
“There in Spain?”
“Yes. He said when he has a daughter he’s calling her Rachel. He said he fell in love with her when he saw her.”
“I remember that he was nice to her,” I said.
“I didn’t even remember. I just remember him talking about getting killed, with that light in his eyes.”
I was tidying up while the meat loaf cooked. They’d eaten oranges, and I gathered the peels and threw them away. The breakfast dishes were still in the sink. I was washing them, knowing that Nathan was standing behind me. Then he came closer and put his hands on my shoulders just the way Billy had, not wrapping the whole palm over the shoulder but taking my shoulders between his thumbs and forefingers, the way one would pick up a dress. When Billy did it, it made me feel as if he thought I might break, as if the loss of my daughter had shriveled me until I was brittle. Nathan’s fingers felt different, more definite. I turned off the water and he pulled me around and looked down into my face. Then he kissed me hard on the lips.
Nathan had kissed me many times in the years since he had gone to bed with Pearl and since Racket had died—two events I thought of together now—but if he kissed me in the kitchen it was to comfort me because I was crying. He kissed me in bed when he made love to me, but his lovemaking had been perfunctory, almost embarrassed, as if someone behind him were saying, “Now kiss her.”
But that evening in the kitchen he kissed me like my young lover, and groped at my clothes as though he had never seen me without them. I was wearing a blouse and skirt and I laughed at him as he unbuttoned the blouse slowly, from the top down. “Now what’s got into you?” I said.
“I don’t know. It’s a good time, isn’t it?”
“Don’t you want to have supper?”
“When will it be ready?”
The meat loaf had half an hour to bake.
“That’ll do, I guess,” said Nathan. I laughed and turned down the oven.
We went into the bedroom, me with my blouse still hanging open. I hadn’t had time to make the bed in the morning and it was still unmade. Nathan undressed quickly and I took off my clothes, too, sitting down to unroll my stockings.
“I love to watch you do that,” he said.
“Do what?”
“Roll your stockings down. You do it with the bottoms of your fingers, not the tips.”
“I don’t want to start a run.”
“You’re a kind person, Hilda,” he said, a little sentimentally.
“Kind to my stockings?”
It was pleasant to take them off and to wiggle out of my girdle. Nathan hadn’t watched me get undressed for a long time. He’d seen me, of course, night after night, but he hadn’t seemed to be watching me. Maybe he had been, all along, if he looked forward to seeing me take off my stockings. I felt free and as if my belly was a pleasant thing, for once.
I got into bed. He was hard—he had been erect the whole time I was undressing. I wanted to give him everything, all the warm circles of excitement gathering in my body. My breasts seemed to reach toward him when he stroked them.
I thought he was murmuring “little one” when he entered me. I wasn’t certain and didn’t want to ask. The words I thought I heard moved me. I hadn’t been anyone’s little one for a long time. “My big girl,” my father used to say, when I would cook a meal after my mother got sick. I had learned how to be big. I didn’t want to be little forever, but I wanted to be little for a while.
“Sweet,” Nathan was saying. “Good.” He made love to me vigorously and even a little brutally, as if there was no question it was going to happen, and could be no question. I loved it. I hadn’t thought about how every gesture, before, was a question, but now I saw that that was how it had been. And he laughed. He gnawed at my shoulders and neck, and laughed as if he were a gigantic, outrageous pet let loose on me. I felt young, a girl, a beautiful girl.
He kept saying endearments that didn’t make sense, as if he had never learned, and had to make them up. “Sweet little,” he said, “sweet little.”
When we were finally still I said, “Aren’t you hungry?” Then I said, “That was lovely.”
“It was lovely,” said Nathan. “I’m starving. What happened to dinner?”
“I was going to boil potatoes to go with the meat loaf,” I said. “I didn’t even peel them.”
“Well, we’d better peel some potatoes, then,” he said, but he put his arm around me and pulled me closer, as if I was his girlfriend and he was a sailor and we were walking on the boardwalk, and I leaned my head into the crook of his shoulder and neck, there in bed. I began to be cold, and pulled the covers around us.
“I want you to be like that all the time,” I said.
“All right.”
I didn’t want to ask questions, but after a few minutes he began to talk. “Billy talked and talked about the baby,” he said.
“You said that.”
“And about you.”
“About me?”
“He talked about Spain,” Nathan said. “How sometimes what a man did led to something terrible happening. Once he and a friend were talking, and then the friend got up to take a piss. It was the middle of the night, and they were lying under some rocks, trying to get some sleep. They knew the rebels were around them. His friend was shot on the way to the ditch they used as a latrine.”
“He got killed?” I said.
“That’s right,” said Nathan. “Billy said he kept thinking that if he’d said one more thing, to delay the man, it might not have happened, or if he hadn’t talked at all, the man might have gotten up sooner, and it might not have happened.”
“I understand,” I said.
“He said it must be like that for you. I don’t know if it is.”
“Like what?”
“Do you torture yourself—blaming yourself for—for what happened?” he said.
I considered. I felt close to him. “No,” I said. “I did for a while.” And that was true. There was the moment when I let Pearl take the stroller while I took the carriage—how about that moment?
Nathan was silent for a long time. Then he said, “Hilda, please don’t take this wrong. I miss Rachel every day. I feel terrible about losing her. But sometimes I think, if you hadn’t done that, I couldn’t have lived. If you hadn’t made a mistake—after. After my mistake.”
“You’d have lived.”
“I’d have been in awe of you all our lives.”
I turned and sobbed into his chest, and then I wiped my eyes and we got up and put on our robes. We peeled the potatoes together.