1960
Francie Goldman had a big bust and a bad reputation. The first was the cause of the second, because in the tenth grade, boys weren’t sure exactly what to do about big busts. And even if they had been, it wouldn’t matter, because in 1960 most girls who had big busts wouldn’t let them do anything anyway. So the boys in the tenth grade at Taylor Allderdice High School had fantasies about Francie Goldman and were embarrassed by the fantasies, which made them uncomfortable. And that’s why they made up stories about her and gave her a bad reputation. But the truth of the matter was that Francie had reached the age of sixteen and not one boy had ever touched her big bust. Even over her clothes. In fact she had never had a date.
Rosie Jane knew that and she didn’t care what the boys said. She knew the real Francie. The girl who made her laugh with her imitation of how Milton Berle twitched his lips and how Sid Caesar said “Whoa boy,” and best of all did imitations of Victor Borge on her baby grand piano, which took up the entire living room of the Goldmans’ tiny house. The piano was a Steinway. It had been a gift from Francie’s grandfather, who called it a “Steinberg.” Rosie loved to sit and listen to Francie play anything on the piano, even her exercises. And when Rosie was there, after Francie finished playing the classical pieces she was working on, she would play popular songs and show tunes, and she and Rosie would sing every Judy Garland song from AStar Is Born and Meet Me in Saint Louis until they were both hoarse.
“R.J.,” Francie would say, calling Rosie by the nickname she had given her, “I think Garland can sleep well tonight. Her career is safe.”
When Francie was asked to join the drama club because they needed someone to play the piano for their productions, she begged R.J., whose other options were Entre Nous, the French Club, and the home ec cooking club, to join with her. The two girls had some funny ideas for the Follies, the show the Drama Club put on every year to poke fun at the school, and when they told the ideas to Mrs. Joseph, the drama teacher, she asked them to write them down. By the time the Follies was assembled in the spring, most of it had been written by Rabinowitz and Goldman.
“The famous team of…” Francie called them that morning when she flopped herself down on her bed, her big bust bouncing up and down under her baby doll pajamas, one pink rubber curler falling out of her short silky hair onto the bed.
“Shit,” she said, feeling the piece of hair from which the curler had fallen. “Straight as a stick.” One at a time she pulled out the other curlers she’d stoically slept on all night. Her hope had been that the discomfort of the little clothespin devices would pay off in a glamorous hairdo. But they hadn’t. “Shit,” she repeated, and ran a hand through her slightly bent straight hair. “Now that I’m famous, I really ought to start looking better. I mean, we may even have to take a bow for the audience on opening night of the Follies.” She rubbed her cheeks hard with a towel. “I need rouge. I need outfits. I need to start being a woman. I’ve had my periods for two years already. I could have babies and be a mother now. Except for one crucial element. No one even asks me out.” Then she grinned that big Francie grin she always grinned before she said something she thought was funny and said, “I’ve discovered a new form of birth control. It’s called unpopularity.”
Both girls laughed.
“Francie, I know any minute you’re going to meet somebody,” R.J. said.
“That’s what you said when we went to New York,” Francie told her, rifling through a box filled with various makeup containers she’d bought for herself at Kresge’s five-and-ten, used one time, and then thrown, disappointed in their results, into the box. The month before, when Frande’s brother Marshall was scheduled to play a recital at Juilliard, Francie’s parents had offered to take R.J. along to New York to see Marshall’s performance and share Francie’s room in a hotel. R.J. had been out of Pittsburgh only once, to go to Atlantic City with her parents. In New York the Goldmans and R.J. would stay at the Commodore Hotel. Francie and R.J. would have their own room with a bathroom. R.J. was dying to go to New York. Francie, who hated her virtuoso violinist brother, was hoping to get out of it.
“Maybe you’ll meet someone at Juilliard,” R.J. had urged, hoping to get Francie excited, “A musician, so you’ll have something in common. Francie had made a face. As it turned out, Marshall had the flu and after they arrived in New York and just missed being in a car pileup with three taxis, they got to Juilliard to find out that the recital was canceled. So the Goldmans bought theater tickets from a scalper for themselves and the girls, and on Friday night they saw Gypsy and on Saturday night they saw West Side Story. Francie and R.J. were first wide-eyed and then in tears over both shows, and all the way back to Pittsburgh in Sam Goldman’s new Ford, they sang the songs over and over again.
“Do you know,” Francie said, now at the big round mirror over the dresser, penciling dark eyebrows over her blond ones with a red Maybelline pencil, “the only time I’ve ever even seen a man’s thing was one time when I was, get this, on my way home from Hebrew school. I was waiting for the Squirrel Hill bus, and I looked into my purse and I realized that—”
“There was a man’s thing in it?” R.J. asked.
Both girls laughed. Francie’s laugh always began with a shriek, then became a cackle. R.J. loved it.
“Francie, tell the truth. Where did you buy that purse?” R.J. asked.
“No,” Francie managed finally. “When I looked into my purse I realized that I didn’t have the right change for the bus. I think I had a dime and a quarter and I needed a nickel and a quarter, so I said to this guy who was standing there waiting for the bus too—”
“Excuse me, sir, can I see your thing?” R.J. said, and Francie laughed again.
“R.J., shut up,” she said. “So I said to this guy who was standing there in the snow—by the way, it was snowing—I said, ‘Excuse me, do you have two nickels for a dime?’ We were all alone on that corner there, and he turns and opens his coat and there’s his thing sticking out at me. Right outside the Hebrew school.”
“France, I don’t want to hear the rest of the story if the punch line is that the guy was the rabbi.”
“R.J., have you ever seen a man’s thing?” Francie asked, eyes wide. R.J. hadn’t.
“They’re big. They’re extremely big. At least this guy’s was. I gotta tell ya. I was scared.”
“My God, that isn’t funny,” R.J. said, seeing the fear in Francie’s eyes. But then Francie started to laugh, and R.J. laughed with her.
“Anyway, I was so scared, I dropped my Hebrew books on the ground and I ran. A few minutes later, while I was still running, the Squirrel Hill bus passed me. You know. The bus I’d been standing there waiting for, for twenty minutes before the guy showed me his thing. And when the bus went by me, there was the guy sitting in the back of the bus as if nothing had happened: just sitting there reading—”
“Not your Hebrew books?”
“The newspaper,” Francie said, slapping R.J.’s arm. “Arj,” she confessed, getting suddenly serious, “I haven’t told that story to anybody because I’m embarrassed about it, and I think it’s kind of why I’ve been staying away from boys a lot, and don’t ever talk to them. I worry so much every time I look at a boy that he has a thing like that man’s hidden in his pants that I can’t say a word. Maybe that’s why even though I have the boobs that ate Chicago I don’t ever get asked out.”
Before R.J. could say anything, Francie had thrown her chenille robe over her baby doll pajamas and was tugging at R.J.’s arm. “Let’s go sit down at Steinberg and make up some more songs.”
It was a few days after Francie told that story about the flasher that she met Avery Willis. He was a senior who was on the stage crew for the Follies. At night he worked in a gas station. Every day at rehearsal, Avery and Francie would kid around. Francie seemed comfortable with him, and seemed to be over her fear of men’s things. Avery wore Aqua Velva aftershave, and Francie went and bought some in the drugstore, and when she was home alone, she opened it and took a whiff because it reminded her of Avery. When he asked her on a date, something she’d been praying for, she had to say no, because Avery Willis was a sheygets, not Jewish, and she would never dream of asking her mother, who was president of her B’nai Brith chapter, or her father, who went to synagogue every Saturday morning, if she was allowed to go. She just told Avery no, then came to R.J.’s parents’ apartment over the grocery store, and when R.J. came up from work, Francie sat on the bed that used to be Bubbe’s bed and cried.
“I love him, Arj,” she said through her tears and trembling lips. She wasn’t wearing any makeup and when her face was this bright red, her eyebrows disappeared completely.
“France, he’s the first boy in your life,” R.J. reminded her. Thank God, she thought. Thank God this isn’t me. My parents would kill me. Louie and Rifke had made it very clear to her that the only acceptable boys to bring home were Jewish boys. And even when she was a tiny girl, Bubbe had told her again and again: Stick with your own kind. No matter what. In Russia they had had a saying for it that Bubbe repeated again and again. “Besser der eygener bedder vi der fremder Rov.” Better your own bathhouse attendant than somebody else’s rabbi. Goyishe men drank too much and beat their wives. And some day, even though they might pretend to love you in the beginning, someday they would call you a dirty Jew. And now Francie, her best friend, was saying she loved a boy who was a candidate for that kind of manhood.
“You’ll get over it,” R.J. said, thinking how much she sounded like her own mother when she did. “Your mother told me she had a friend who might pay us to make up some songs for her. Let’s think about that.”
“Arj, I have to see him,” Francie said, and R.J. knew when she looked at her friend at that moment, that Francie was picturing herself as Ingrid Bergman in Indiscreet, so in love that she couldn’t control herself. She also knew that though Francie was hurting, she loved herself in that grown-up role so much that she would play it out. But for Francie, unlike” Ingrid, the ending would be real bad.
Mona Feldstein Friedman was a travel agent who wanted to be a stand-up comic, and the truth of the matter was that she was very funny at parties when she told stories about crazy things that happened to her clients. But she knew that if she wanted to be serious about being funny onstage, she had to do more than just tell stories about people she knew. She needed ideas. She needed jokes. She needed songs. Pearl Goldman, Francie’s mother, who had booked the New York trip and several of her trips to Florida through Mona’s travel agency, suggested that Mona make an appointment with “my genius daughter Francie, who when she graduates will follow in her brother’s footsteps to Juilliard, and her girlfriend from the grocery store.” So she did. And when the two sixteen-year-old girls arrived at her apartment and she saw how nervous they were, Mona Feldstein Friedman had to hold back her look of disappointment.
“I’ll tell you right now, I have very little money,” Mona Feldstein Friedman said as the two girls sat down on the orange crushed-velvet sofa in her living room. “So I’ll pay you what I think the material is worth.”
Neither Francie nor R.J. had any idea what that meant so they both nodded. Then they told her about the songs they had written for the Follies. R J, described some sketches, and when they finished, Mona Feldstein Friedman was giddy with excitement because these girls were good, but she tried to conceal it because she didn’t want them to get too pushy.
They wrote her a parody to the tune of “Dancing in the Dark,” called “Pittsburgh After Dark.” They wrote her a monologue about a Jewish immigrant who tries to hide the fact by becoming a nightclub singer, only her cover is blown when she sings the song “Getting to Know You,” because when she gets to the line in the song where she’s supposed to sing “you are precisely my cup of tea,” she sings, “you are precisely my glass of tea.”
Most nights at nine, when R.J. came up from working in the grocery store, Francie would come over and stay until midnight. Every Sunday, Francie would get there very early in the morning and they would work all day on the words. Some days when the songs were ready they would go to Francie’s and try them out on Steinberg. On those days Pearl Goldman would come in and listen and beam at her daughter.
“I’m Kvelling,” she would say, meaning that she was very proud.
When Mona Feldstein Friedman’s show opened at Weinstein’s Back Room, Pearl and Sam Goldman and Rifke and Louie Rabinowitz were invited to sit at a front table free. The show was a hit. And while the audience was still applauding, backstage—which in this case meant behind a screen at the rear of the platform—Mona Feldstein Friedman handed Frande an envelope containing fifty dollars, and another one to R.J. Cash. R.J. was flying. After packing grocery bags and carrying them out to people’s cars, and unpacking merchandise and dusting shelves, and sweeping the sidewalk outside the grocery store in the warm seasons and shoveling the snow in the cold seasons, she couldn’t believe that this could be called working. Laughing with Frande, her best friend, making up songs, something they both loved to do together, and they were getting paid to do it.
“Thank you, Mona,” R.J. said, grinning.
“This will help,” Frande said mysteriously and put the envelope in her purse. R.J. held hers in her hand, elated. Especially when Mona, heady from the cries of bravo (though they were from her brother-in-law Harvey, who sat in the back row), said, “This is only the beginning.” And it was. Mona got great reviews. R.J. and Francie were mentioned by name in the Pittsburgh Press and the Pittsburgh Post Gazette. Mona called the girls constantly, needing new ideas for her show, and she paid them in cash each time. The Weinsteins had plans to remodel the restaurant so the back room could accommodate a larger audience, and R.J. was making enough money to stop working in Uncle Shulke’s grocery store.
One Saturday night just before she went to sleep she was making some notes for herself about things she wanted to tell Francie, when she heard the telephone ringing in the hallway. It was late. Her parents were both asleep. Who could be calling at this hour?
“Hello, Rosie Jane.” It was Pearl Goldman, and R.J. knew immediately from the tone in Francie’s mother’s voice that the trouble she’d anticipated about Frande and Avery was starting now. “Is my daughter there?”
“You mean Frande?” R.J. asked, stalling for time to think, knowing that was a stupid thing to say because Francie was Mis. Goldman’s only daughter. “Uh, no, she’s not.”
“She’s not,” Mrs. Goldman said, repeating R.J.’s words, and she didn’t sound surprised, just as if she was repeating what R.J. said so that Mr. Goldman could hear. “Well, you see, I thought she might be there, since she sleeps at your house every Saturday night to work on Mona’s show. Isn’t that right?”
R.J.’s heart was pounding. It had started pounding when the phone rang, but now she could feel it against her rib cage. Francie may have slept at her house once or twice in the last several months, but certainly not every Saturday night. Why did her mother think so? Should she lie? Where was Francie? R.J. loved Francie. Wherever she was, she would have to protect her. She would lie.
“Don’t lie, Rosie Jane,” Mrs. Goldman said before Rosie could open her mouth. “Don’t lie or I’ll tell your parents and your school and everyone who knows you.” Mrs. Goldman’s voice had gotten higher and higher and was now verging on hysteria.
“Where is my Francie, goddammit? Is she with that sheygets, my daughter? Is she in a motel someplace with that goyishe son of a bitch? Where is she? I’ll kill her. I’ll kill her. I’ll die.” And then big heaving sobs came.
“I don’t know,” R.J. said, sure that Mrs. Goldman didn’t even hear her. She was afraid that her parents had heard the phone or would hear her talking and come out to see what was wrong.
“Oy, God,” Mrs. Goldman cried. Then R.J. heard her say, away from the phone, “Sam, she’s not there. Call the police.” And then there was a click and R.J. stood holding the dead phone.
R.J. went back into her room and sat on her bed. She never turned the light off. Just sat waiting and dreading what would happen next. All night. She remembered the times she’d sat on the floor of Francie’s bedroom, laughing and playing Scrabble and smoking Parliaments, which Frande called “my brand” even though she had the same pack in her purse for two months because both she and R.J. only smoked when they played Scrabble together. Frande. The day they each took five dollars of the money they’d earned from Mona’s show, caught the bus downtown, and bought friendship rings. The rings were a circle of gold-plated hearts. Frande bought a size four for R.J., and R.J. bought a size six for Francie, and over a cheeseburger in the Sun Drugstore, they exchanged them.
“Who’s your best?” Frande asked.
“You are. Who’s yours?” R.J. wanted to know.
“You are,” Frande said as she licked some ketchup from her fingers. Frande.
At nine o’clock in the morning, R.J.’s eyes were stinging and bloated, and she was shaking with exhaustion when she heard Francie’s familiar knock, and she ran downstairs to the door and threw it open. Frande stood grinning in the doorway.
“I got a great idea called ‘Mona in Miami.’ We use the ‘Miami Beach Rhumba,’ and Mona comes out wearing this outfit—”
“Francie, your mother knows,” R.J. said. “She called last night. She knows you haven’t been—”
“Sleeping here.” Frande finished the sentence, and grabbed on to the door jamb, as though if she didn’t hold it tightly she would collapse.
“She thinks you were with Avery,” R.J. said, hoping, praying Frande would laugh at that and have some explanation of where she’d been that would make everything okay. Take away the picture that had been in R.J.’s mind all night of Frande and Avery.
“Avery and I are getting married, Arj. I’ve saved every penny of Mona’s money, and Avery’s gonna marry me. I mean, see the thing is… we’ll never starve, because if Mona quits needing you and me, I can always play cocktail piano somewhere.” When she said that last part, R.J. knew it was something Frande had probably repeated over and over to reassure Avery, so she didn’t mention that sixteen was too young to get a job playing cocktail piano. “Anyway, let’s get to work,” Frande said, moving forward so R.J. would have to walk back up the stairs. “I’m gonna need the money.”
That night when Frande got home from R.J.’s, Pearl and Sam Goldman had a suitcase packed with her clothes in it. After screaming at her and calling her a liar and a prostitute they made her leave, and she moved in with Avery’s married sister to wait until the wedding. After that, Avery would work in the gas station full time and they would get a small apartment in Hazelwood. R.J. knew all the details because Francie, elated but edgy, still came to work in the evenings with her. Sometimes it made R.J. uncomfortable to think that Francie, her best friend, went home and slept with a man. Maybe naked. And had sex. There were times when she wanted to stop in the middle of their writing and ask, “What does sex feel like? Does it hurt? Is it wonderful?” But she never did. Never asked questions. Just let Francie give her whatever information she felt like giving.
“They’ll take me back some day, Arj,” she said about her parents one night while she and R.J. were working on a song for Mona about how she wished she looked like Jackie Kennedy. “They’ll miss me and they’ll take me back no matter what I do,”
Two weeks later, on a Saturday night, when Mona Feldstein Friedman tried out the “Mona in Miami” number, Francie and Avery drove to Maryland to get married. R.J. sat alone at a table in the back of Weinstein’s Back Room. The audience was laughing at Mona, who was complaining that all the men in Miami Beach were so old that it should be called God’s waiting room. R.J. took a sip of the Coca-Cola one of the waiters regularly brought her while she watched Mona. She imagined Francie and Avery driving on the turnpike in Avery’s Nash Rambler with the radio on. Francie with her arm around Avery, who was telling htr how much he loved her. For a moment R.J. wished she were in France’s place. Except for the part about her parents.
Francie had tried over and over to call Sam and Pearl Goldman, but she’d only get as far as saying, “Ma, please,” or “Daddy, listen,” and when they heard her voice they would hang up. She put letters in their mailbox, and she got no response from them. She stood outside the beauty parlor where her mother went every Tuesday, and when her mother came out she ran to her and tried to get her to talk to her. But her mother kept walking and got into her car and drove away, even when Francie stood there and begged.
R.J. could hear Mona saying words, and the audience laughing, but now it was all just loud noises to her. She had tears in her eyes that made Mona a blurry picture on the stage. Before Mona got to the part about all the women wearing mink stoles even though the temperature was in the nineties, R.J. stood and walked out the door to the bus stop. A light rain had started to fall, but R.J. didn’t bother to stand under the bus-stop shelter. She stood at the edge of the curb, watching the street become slick and wet until it reflected the purplish glow of the streetlights. When the Murray Avenue bus came she got on it and stayed on it past her own stop, to Lilac Street, and got off. But now the rain was coming down hard, and she quickened her pace as she headed up the hill to the duplex where the Goldmans lived, up the steps to their porch, and knocked on the door.
After a few minutes Francie’s brother Marshall opened the door. Marshall was very handsome. R.J. was surprised to see him home from New York, but Marshall, on the other hand, only said, “Wet out there, Rosie Jane?” as if he’d been expecting her, and when she walked into the living room she realized why. Pearl and Sam Goldman, and Francie’s aunt Blossom and her uncle Marvin Fishmann, and Hy and Bessie Heft from the hardware store, and Francie’s grandfather, the one who called the piano Steinberg, were all sitting there, on the same kind of wooden folding chairs Rifke had rented so relatives and friends could sit shiva when Bubbe died. The chairs were all in a kind of circle around the closed baby grand piano, as if it were a coffin. As if Francie was in it.
“Mrs. Goldman,” R.J. said. For the first time, in the heat of the living room, she could feel how wet her clothes were. She was surprised by the loudness of her own voice, and the others must have been, too, because the conversations they’d been having when she walked in all stopped while they looked at her. Pearl Goldman didn’t have any look of recognition on her face.
“I came here to tell you that Francie loves you and I thought that maybe if you heard it coming from me, you would understand that—”
Pearl Goldman never let R.J. finish. She jumped to her feet and screamed, “Francie’s dead. There is no Francie, and you get out of here.”
“She’s your daughter,” R.J. said, “and she loves you and you have to—”
“No. Dead. She’s goddamned dead,” Pearl Goldman screamed.
Francie’s brother Marshall walked over to R.J. now and took her arm.
“Rosie Jane, you’d better go,” he said.
“But I can’t go. Someday they’ll be sorry they did this,” R.J. said, reaching out a hand to Mrs. Goldman, who turned away from her. Mr. Goldman stood now, too, his hands in his pockets.
“Someday you’ll wish you could be with her. Someday there’ll be grandchildren.”
Mrs. Goldman turned, eyes wide, to her husband.
“What did I tell you? She’s pregnant by that goylshe dog!”
“She’s not,” R.J. said. “But one day after they’re married she will be and you’ll want to be there.”
“For goyishe grandchildren?” Pearl Goldman said, horrified, and then she said, “Ptooey,” as if she were spitting on the ground.
“You better go,” Francie’s brother Marshall said again, his grip on R.J.’s arm tightening. But R.J. didn’t move. She stood tall and looked at both Goldmans and begged them.
“Don’t do this. She isn’t dead.”
There was no response.
“Don’t, please. She isn’t dead.”
Marshall moved her slowly but firmly toward the door, and as if to say a polite goodbye, the other guests stood.
“Do you want to borrow an umbrella?” Marshall asked as he opened the door and R.J. found herself standing on their porch.
“No,” R.J. said. “Marshall, Frande is—” And then the door was quietly closed in her face. A crackle of lightning across the sky lit up the night for a moment, and R.J., her wet clothes sticking to her, walked down to the street and home.
Her parents were sitting at the kitchen table, and while Rifke warmed up some soup, R.J. told them the whole story about Frande. Her mother tsked and looked down at the table and commented with the Yiddish expression of anguish: “A zochen vey.” What a pity. And her father grunted and at one point pushed the spoon so hard into his matzo ball that when it broke apart, the noodles spilled out of the bowl onto the table. When she had finished telling the part about how Marshall had dosed the door on her, her mother nodded, as if to say she wasn’t surprised, and then added inexplicably, “Well, at least we have our health.”
“Ma,” R.J. asked. “How can they sit shiva for her? I mean, it’s crazy. She isn’t even dead. She isn’t.” And she put her head down on the kitchen table and said it again. “She’s not dead.”
But R.J. was wrong, because only minutes before, Avery Willis’s Nash Rambler, on its way back from Cumberland, Maryland, skidded on the wet turnpike and had a head-on collision with a gasoline truck, and the newly married couple was killed instantly.
At the Follies during the curtain call, Mrs. Joseph, the drama teacher, asked the audience to “please observe one minute of silence for our departed friends Avery Willis and Francie Goldman.” She said it that way—Avery Willis and Francie Goldman—because Francie’s parents had telephoned the school and requested that she not be referred to as Francie Willis, even though that was legally her name when she died.