Leaving Brooklyn Read online

  “Oh, I loved to watch her. And I had such a crush on you, it was pathetic. Did you know?”

  “Really? Me? But you were just a baby. Oh, wait a minute, I remember you wrote me a letter when I joined the Navy. It was a cute letter.”

  “I missed you. Then you came back and got married. You threw me over without mercy. Well, that’s life, isn’t it?”

  “Sure is,” he agreed.

  “What did you do in the Navy, anyway?”

  “I was a seaman. Deck force. We kept up the ship, painting and repairs and so on. We were stationed in Hawaii most of the time. Great place for swimming.”

  I started up the steps. “Bobby, why don’t you try looking for a job in the city? There’s so much happening there. I go in a lot because of the eye doctor. It’s another world, really.”

  “And travel forty minutes each way on that crowded subway? Nah, who needs that?”

  “Well, thanks for walking me home.”

  “Any time. And listen, Audrey, I didn’t mean anything, you know that.”

  “I know. ’Night, Bobby.”

  From the porch I watched him recede, hands in his pockets again, head down. Under the streetlight his silhouette was haloed in snow and his profile took on a bluish cast. The crystals on his pea coat gleamed like rhinestones.

  I hadn’t needed my good eye to get home. I could do it without eyes. Or someone like Bobby would come along and willingly take me. On that dreamy one-eyed walk from the subway, the familiar streets and shops had barely existed; my entire past barely existed, could be rolled up into a mote in the eye and winked away. As I stood on my porch, just outside the arc of warm light from within, already hearing the rumbly voices of the men, and beneath them, in counterpoint, the lithe, fluty voices of the women, I was sure my true life had not yet begun. And when it did, oh how freely I would float.

  I opened the door and stepped into the card party, in full swing.

  There they were, my father, Mr. Zelevansky, Mr. Ribowitz, Mr. Singer, Mr. Capaleggio, and Mr. Tessler, amidst their cards and glasses of soda and ashtrays and nuts and pretzels. I could greet them easily now. They were men like the eye doctor. They took off their glasses and their clothes in the same way, and climbed on their women. And though I could readily picture them doing that, climbing on their women—busy at mah jongg in the next room—I could not so readily imagine their making love to them, cupping a breast in one hand and leaning over till the tongue found the tip of the nipple, or tracing the line of the torso with a tender thumbnail. If they did, it was beyond my vision.

  I beamed a smile on all and yanked off my scarf. My father’s back was to me. I bent to kiss him on the cheek and he accepted my kiss with a slight turn of the head, his eyes detaching reluctantly from his cards. “Oh, cold, Audrey!”

  “It’s snowing again,” I sang out in the juicy operatic tone of Mrs. Gamanos in the doctor’s waiting room. “Hello, Mr. Tessler. Hi, Mr. Cappy. Hello, hello. How are all you gentlemen?” As I cir - cled the table I let my hand alight for a second on Lou Zelevansky’s shoulder. “Hi, Lou, how are you?” He, after all, was the one I had known since my birth, the one with whom my parents had listened to Joe Louis knock out Max Schmeling in the first round before I was conceived. I expected the men might drop their cards in shock and my father leap from his chair, demanding to know what I thought I was doing, addressing Mr. Zelevansky by his first name. Or he would burst out laughing and say, “Look who’s grown up all of a sudden! Who does she think she is?” But nothing happened. No one seemed to notice. It was easier than I had thought, just as what I had done with the eye doctor was easy. There for the taking, as perhaps many of life’s privileges were. That crucial secret must be what distinguished the adventurous from the timid. Mr. Zelevansky replied that he was fine, thank you, and inquired in kind, and the game continued.

  I proceeded through the archway to the dining room, where I could hardly say hello before the smiling women were exclaiming over me—how suddenly grown up, how was I doing in school, wasn’t I cold, wasn’t I hungry?

  Not cold, never cold, but hungry. A plate was waiting in the oven: roast chicken—maybe Bobby had delivered it while I lay on the eye doctor’s couch—rice and string beans. Applesauce for dessert, my mother called into the kitchen, but if I could wait till later they would be having apple pie.

  “Poor Audrey, she has to stand while she’s eating. We’ ve taken her chair,” said blond, garrulous Mrs. Tessler. “Here, dear, use my chair. I don’t need it—I’m East this hand.”

  “Thanks, it’s quite all right. I don’t mind standing.” I was perfectly comfortable leaning on the door frame, observing the games and gnawing on my chicken leg. In my head, I was matching the women with their husbands, imagining them doing what I had done. Mr. Cappy in the distance, slender and ruddy, his pipe protruding from his mouth at an interesting angle, was the only one of the men besides my father who might by prevailing movie and advertising standards be called attractive. I envisioned him curved over Mrs. Cappy, a hollow-cheeked woman with glinting black eyes, fuzzy hair, long gold earrings, and jutting bones. Her eyes closed, her earrings quivered. Roly-poly Mrs. Tessler straddled her roly-poly husband—a man so quiet that for a long time I had assumed he must have a cleft palate like the chicken flicker—on one of the king-sized beds from their furniture store, the pair of them bouncing like green-eyed teddy bears. Mr. Tessler and Mr. Singer, the possible widower or divorcé, were known to be inseparable friends as well as business partners ; perhaps Mr. Singer watched.

  Had these women, hair carved by beauticians, bodies encased in God knows what steely underclothes, ever felt what I felt? Was it possible? If they had, how could they be sitting here calmly playing mah jongg?

  I closed my good eye, and my bad eye, serene and shameless, conjured up the bunch of them frolicking around the living room, a welter of pink and tan flesh tripping over the furniture, moans and leers and giggles. From far away I heard Mrs. Tessler ask what I was taking in school. I blinked and refocused, and the orgy vanished. Pre-Marriage, I replied. We would be doing budgets soon, and bathing a rubber doll in a plastic tub.

  “I ’m surprised they waste your time like that. You’d be better off doing English or history or something. There’s plenty of time later on to learn how to bathe a baby.”

  I had misjudged her. “That’s true,” I agreed, “but it’s an easy course, you know, and they let you take it easy senior year when most of the requirements are over.”

  “Hm. Seems to be rushing things, especially if you’re going to college. So where do you think you’ll go, Audrey? Brooklyn? Or City?”

  “I haven’t decided, I’ve been so busy. I have another month or so to apply. I wish I could go out of town.”

  “Out of town,” echoed my father, wandering in to commence his customary teasing of the women. He would examine their tiles and ask foolish questions, pretending to be at once too simple-minded and too lofty to understand their game, and then threaten to reveal their strategies to the others. They would scold and he would revel in their scolding. “Out of town. I’d have to be made of money to do that. Anyway, this one doesn’t have the sense to come in out of the rain, how can she go out of town?”

  “I just came in out of the snow, didn’t I?” I managed to find my way home from Manhattan, I started to say, but caught my tongue in time.

  I backed into the kitchen, kicked up the doorstop, and let the swinging door fly. My cheeks and eyeballs were burning. Was that for calling Mr. Zelevansky Lou? No, he would have attacked that on the spot. He must know about the lens. But how could he? He hadn’t this morning, and my mother was far too shrewd to break the news right before a card party. He had barely looked at me when I entered, and in any case was no more observant than Bobby. Probably his partner had made a stupid move and he was losing. Why even seek a cause? Since when did his spasms of bitterness require provocation? It meant nothing to him that I had broken the bank—I was still not smart enough to take care of myse
lf. I wished I could hurl in his face all that I knew now, make him see it and wince and burn as I did.

  “Why must you say things like that?” I heard my mother scold. “What did she do?”

  “What did I say? Only the truth. Now, what have we here? Why do you have those green ones all mixed up with the red? Shouldn’t they be separate?”

  “Oh, go back to your men. We were doing fine before you came to pester us.”

  I was trapped in the kitchen—I couldn’t get upstairs without passing him, and I couldn’t bear to be near him. His words thudded in my head. I leaned against the sink, trying to drive them out by concentration. The eye doctor. I could get wet just remembering. I was absorbed in how far my concentration might take me, when the kitchen door swung open. My mother must be East, with about ten minutes to spare.

  She took raw vegetables out of the refrigerator and heaped them on the table. When they were all arrayed like a still life, she drew a deep breath and faced me. “Don’t feel so bad. Don’t take him seriously. You know he doesn’t mean any harm.”

  “What does he mean, then?”

  “He just does it to show off.”

  “But what is he showing off?”

  “Audrey, you can’t go around analyzing every little thing so deeply. Where will it get you? Just forget it. Here, as long as you’re standing around, cut these tomatoes into quarters.” She handed me a knife.

  “I really wish I could get my own apartment.”

  “Someday you will, I’m sure.” Hastily, she arranged slices of green pepper and radishes in an artistic design, grabbing the tomato quarters as fast as I could cut them.

  “I’m not talking about someday. If I have to go to college in the city, maybe I can find a cheap place and get a part-time job to pay for it.”

  “I can’t pay attention to one of your speeches right now, Audrey. Can’t you see I’m trying to do something?”

  “I’m not stopping you. I’m helping you. This is my future I’m talking about. It’s also possible not to go to college right away, you know. I could move out and get a job in the city and save up to go later. At night, if necessary.”

  She was attacking the peel of a cucumber in quick, tense strokes. Into her silence came the sweet, burbling sound of the mah jongg tiles; their swift rhythms meant the hand must be nearly over. Any moment she would be called back to the game. Her knuckles on the fist clutching the peeler were white. “I don’t know what’s gotten into you. I’m sorry your father made that remark. It certainly was not called for. But you don’t have to blow it up all out of proportion—”

  “I’m not. I could get a decent job. I know how to do a lot of things. Did it ever occur to you that I might like a change of scene? Or some privacy at this point? Maybe you would too.”

  “Privacy! What kind of privacy does a girl your age need, I’d like to know? You have a bedroom with a door. Isn’t that enough?”

  She wasn’t shrieking as I had shrieked in my scene with Lizzie weeks ago (there was the card party; anyway she was not a shrieker) and her words were not a literal replication of my own. Still, I felt an ecstasy of triumph. I had recreated my improvisation. Life was imitating art.

  They were calling her name from behind the closed door. “The hand is over. We’re starting.” I heard the scrambling of tiles and imagined the mass of fingers, decked with engagement-ring diamonds and gold bands, circling over the center of the table with the potent movements witches make over their brew.

  “I have to go now. But I don’t want to hear any more of this nonsense about jobs and apartments. I’m surprised at you. I thought you had a pretty good home here. I feel very bad. What do you think we’ ve struggled for all these years? Instead of appreciating it you can’t wait to get away. I’m coming in a minute,” she called to the women. “And if you’re going to keep hiding in here you might as well slice some bagels and arrange the lox on the white platter.” With that she wiped her hands on a dish towel and rushed at the door, pushing so hard that it swung back and forth several times after her, in arcs of diminishing range and speed and urgency, until finally it settled.

  Invading my triumph was a queasiness—something not quite fair, not quite true about the scene. Bad faith was what the acting teacher, who had existentialist leanings, would no doubt call it, since my mother was not aware of the predetermined script. He told us bad faith always brought a queasy feeling, like having your cake and eating it and feeling faintly nauseated by it.

  Well, so what? Hadn’t she always acted in bad faith too, from not protesting about my eye, to using the lens to pay for her negligence (making me pay!), to abandoning me to the hands of the eye doctor? Even my father’s outright insults were preferable. Crude, cruel, but honest.

  No, that was worse faith. Everyone knew girls favored their fathers, and the reasons did not bear close scrutiny. Not just now, anyway.

  I cut the bagels and arranged the lox on the platter, thinking of jobs I might get. Restaurant work, assisting the chef. A clerk, a salesgirl. But I knew these tepid fantasies were as false as the scene we had played. My part was prescribed as surely as my mother’s, for as long as I remained in Brooklyn. Next year would find me right here, going to a local college. And I should be grateful for that, she would point out: after all, she hadn’t had the same opportunity. And according to her script she was right.

  My lines in class had been uncannily prophetic, and I could take some pride in that. Yet the more I thought about it, the more queasy I grew. Was it my script or hers? Who was reading from whose?

  Two hours later, as I lay on my bed a swirl in the torments of poor Anna Karenina, my mother called up the stairs, “Audrey, we’re having a snack. Do you want to come down and join us?”

  The cards and mah jongg tiles and bridge tables were gone. The dining room table was open to its full length, laden with food, and around it was assembled the card party, husbands next to wives. I took a seat far from my parents, between Lou Zelevansky and Mrs. Ribowitz, whom my father privately called the intellectual because she taught calculus at a high school, attended lectures at the Ethical Culture Society, and spoke in what he called a teacher’s voice. Though I defended Mrs. Ribowitz on principle when my father mocked her, there was indeed an asperity to her chalky face and thin hair; I couldn’t readily see her panting under Mr. Ribowitz, his great electric bulb of a head bent over her face. Mrs. Ribowitz illustrated a subtlety I came to understand only long afterwards: no woman in Brooklyn was barred from the life of the mind. She could choose the life of the mind or the life of the body, but she could not have both. If she chose the former, it was considered that she had done so by default. And, given Brooklyn, perhaps she had.

  “I always predicted this would happen. It was only a matter of time,” my father was saying. “I hope it’s on television too. Let’s see him have a taste of what he rammed down people’s throats.”

  The pig. I wrenched my mind from Anna’s trials and listened expectantly.

  “Poetic justice,” murmured Mrs. Ribowitz. “Like a Shakespearean tragedy.”

  “Tragedy my foot,” said yellowish Mr. Singer, spreading cream cheese on a bagel. “The guy’s just a goddamn SOB . They should have done it long ago.”

  “Everything in its time,” said Mr. Capaleggio.

  “That may be,” said Mr. Ribowitz, “but it’s too late for some people. My brother-in-law ’s sister ’s father -in-law, that’s my sister Essie’s husband’s family, was called down, and this fellow really was a pinko, a union organizer. A man close to seventy, so humiliated he came home and had a stroke and now he’s in a wheelchair, drooling. Finished off. The family is in a state of shock. And such fine people. Whatever their views. Very fine. They loaned Essie’s husband money to put the boys through school and Essie doesn’t have it to pay back yet and she feels terrible. Her boys are working two jobs to pay them back. We even gave her something to give them.”

  “Tsk, tsk,” said everyone.

  I could not believe this. �
��Where does he live?” I asked.

  “Oh, over on Cortelyou Road, near Rogers. He’s lucky he owns his own home, because they might have thrown him out of an apartment.”

  This was in the very heart of Brooklyn. I knew the corner.

  “Never mind that,” said Mrs. Tessler. “Our friend Irv Krasnow got the business a year ago on that loyalty oath. Utterly destroyed.”

  “Who is he?” asked my mother.

  “Oh, Pauly and I knew him way back in high school. He always had, you know, progressive ideas. He married my cousin Charlotte’s husband’s sister. You met him at Flo’s wedding, don’t you remember? A professor at Hunter College? Anyway, he refused to sign a piece of paper, just on principle, he says he has nothing to hide and I believe it, but who knows and anyway what difference does it make now? He lost his job, they borrowed from everyone, and now he’s selling shoes on Flatbush Avenue. His hair turned white. His children are so aggravated, you can’t imagine. His son didn’t even get into med school, and he had the highest grades in his class.”

  “Where do they live?” I asked.

  “What?” She shot me a curious look. “Where they live? They live over in Sheepshead Bay. Ocean Avenue somewhere.”

  This too, Brooklyn. I had ambled around there last spring with slow-walking Susan, who wanted a glimpse of a certain boy’s house. It was a fishing neighborhood. Whole families stood on the piers at the bay on Sunday morning dangling their lines in the water, then dumped the fish into buckets at their feet. We had found the house, finally, with a gray De Soto parked in the driveway.

  “Look,” said Belle Zelevansky, “everybody has someone. Our Carol’s piano teacher’s brother, the sweetest man you could ever hope to meet. We see him every year at the recitals—they’re a musical family. He used to play in the orchestras for the Broadway shows, but the union put him on a blacklist and he can’t get work anywhere. He taught violin at a school downtown, but he lost that job too. A man with four young children.”