As Close to Us as Breathing: A Novel (2 page)

Framed and fading, the shot was of their parents, in late June 1939, before their deaths within the next year—Maks of a heart attack, Risel, six months later, of heartache—two stocky souls in the bulky bathing attire of the past, sitting side by side on beach chairs, Maks Syrkin clutching Risel’s hand as if prescient of the separation death would soon bring.

Davy, by then inside, was the first to grow impatient with just looking. Turning from the photo, he raced, fully recovered from his earlier spill, past the radio console, almost knocking it over, until he came to the glass doors on the far side of the room. He opened them in time for Ada and Vivie to step through and into the sunporch, a room that contained a folding cot and dresser, along with a wicker chair and side table. This was the room of their younger sister, Bec, and because of its identification with her I knew my mother and Vivie wouldn’t step into it again for the rest of the summer. But just then they glanced about it, sighed some more, then cranked its many windows open.

From the sunporch the women made their way back through the living room and into the dining room, its oak dining table covered by yet another sheet, which the sisters expertly yanked off then dropped to the floor in a heap. We children, all of us silently following the mothers from room to room—as if this annual rite of examining the place was intrinsically about our well-being rather than about their past—knew that in the next hour we’d have to shake out that sheet and all the others before folding them and tucking them away. The dining room also contained a china cabinet for the best dishes, used only for Shabbos, and a sideboard stuffed with serving platters, pitchers, tablecloths, napkins, and the like. All of it came from Maks and Risel and was included in the sisters’ shared inheritance of the cottage. The dining room’s only other furnishings were a small table holding a telephone, and a simple chair set beside it.

My mother lifted the phone’s receiver, having promised my father that she’d call when we arrived. By this time, just past one in the afternoon, my father, Mort, in Middletown, would have returned from his after-lunch walk up and back Main Street. Satisfied with the morning’s business—ten customers, six sales—he’d be standing in the doorway of his store, staring out the front window. Everyone who passed Leibritsky’s Department Store would know him and wave, and he would wave back, solemnly. Nelson, his bachelor brother and the store’s co-owner, would be downstairs in the basement, placing a needle on the new recording of Benny Goodman that he planned to listen to while on his post-lunch break. Leo Cohen, my father’s brother-in-law and Vivie’s husband, would be alone in the back office, nibbling a bologna sandwich as he read, slowly, about Darwin’s meticulous studies of mold, an early work. For years already Leo had passed his best reads on to Nina and in so doing had recently gotten his daughter hooked on this particular and, in Uncle Leo’s words, “uncannily patient” man.

My mother knew all this, could no doubt picture it in her mind. Phone to her ear, she listened to the buzz of the dial tone as if it were a voice on the summer party line. Then, without dialing, she put the receiver down.

The kitchen was our next stop, but outside its doorway another photograph called for attention, one my father had hung there. Taken in 1942, it showed Davy atop Mort’s shoulders as my father, along with a crowd of Woodmont Jews, walked the length of Woodmont to protest the imprisonment of European Jews—five thousand or so, we thought then—a way of showing the world, however much of it would take note, that they knew what was going on; yes, the Jews of Woodmont knew. In the photo my father, wrapped like the other men in his sacred tallis, was his usual serious self, but Davy had thought the event a festival. Davy pointed. “Me,” he said, smiling just as he was in the photograph. “Us,” my mother answered. She took his hand and moved it across the scene in a sweeping motion that seemed to include the six million that by 1948 we understood to be not merely imprisoned but killed. “Us,” she said again.

We entered the kitchen, then, the way my father wanted us to: reminded of our luck. And there it was, in the speckled linoleum floors and counters, and in the table, a white porcelain enamel top with steel legs, but most especially in the automatic washer, recently purchased from Sears, Roebuck, without a wringer on top. Moving upstairs, the six of us stopped first at the master bedroom, the largest bedroom, at the cottage’s front, which, because my mother had married first and had the most children, she felt entitled to claim. Moving along, we paraded down the hall, past the cottage’s only full bathroom, where an old tub with high sides and clawed feet was the centerpiece. A bit ludicrously, in a way that made us laugh, everyone leaned in to wave at the beloved thing. At the far end of the hallway was a second bedroom, plain enough, shared by Vivie and Leo. Finally we landed at the snug third bedroom midway between the two others, which Davy shared with Howard. Of the twin beds almost touching, Davy’s was the one on the left, and after running a few steps, he managed a flying leap from the doorway onto it. Then he righted himself and began jumping. Before my mother could order him to stop he’d already bounced on the mattress several times, declaring with each airborne lift, “I’m free! I’m free!”

Yes, we were
here,
as my mother had first noted.
Here:
this cottage, the one she and her sisters had grown up spending their summers in, the one her father—a handyman who developed a knack for distinctive cabinetry—had bought and was able to hold on to, even throughout the Depression.

The cottage was itself part of a small complex of cottages, all of them crowding in on each other, set at times three deep between the road and the beach, and not in an orderly line but rather a haphazard clustering. Before ours, but not entirely blocking the view of the Sound, was the Isaacsons’. Beside us lived the Radnicks. Next to them came the Weinsteins. And on and on it went, one family after another, one cottage after the next. And this too, this familiar and messy collection of cottages, is what my mother meant by
here.

Here:
the shore, that small piece of it unofficially called Bagel Beach, which was our beach, the Jews’. We were among the many Jewish families throughout Connecticut (and a few from Massachusetts and New York as well) who funneled down to this spot where some of us owned cottages, some rented, and others stayed in seaside hotels, but all of us kept close, crowded, because in 1948 there were so many places Jews still couldn’t go, so many covenants, formal and informal, restricting us from neighborhoods, resorts, clubs—you name it. The genocide in Europe had yet to change that. But
here,
in this hamlet, we could be. Near the intersection of Merwin and Hillside avenues were Jewish bakers and butchers, and even a one-room Orthodox synagogue—the Woodmont Hebrew Congregation—a building of white clapboard, in the New England way. But its door had recently been painted bright blue, which was hardly a Yankee touch. Rather, it gave the place the vibrant colors of Israel. “Aren’t you adorable,” Howard had said that past May, when, at the news of Israel’s independence, I’d compared Bagel Beach, a small and sandy place that offered solace to the Jews of Connecticut, to Israel, another small and sandy place that would offer solace to the beleaguered Jews of the world. Recently we’d learned that we had a cousin there, Reuben Leibritsky, from Poland, a survivor of the camps, and my father and his brother Nelson sent him money each month.

Technically Bagel Beach was outside the bounds of Woodmont, or at least past the little sign at Woodmont’s western edge that read
Leaving Woodmont on the Sound.
So was the synagogue and so was the place across from it, Sloppy Joe’s, the hamburger shop all the high school kids gravitated toward in the evenings. But all of it—that world inside the bounds of the sign and that small, particularly Jewish stretch beyond it—was what we knew of and meant by Woodmont.

The coastline’s natural shale formations, often huge and jagged piles of rocks, created boundaries that formed Woodmont’s several and distinct beaches, the popular Anchor Beach, for example, which bordered Crescent Beach then Long Beach. Some rock formations had names, like Lazy Rock, Potato Rock, and Signal Rock, identifiable off the shore of Anchor Beach by its flagpole. Our beach was separated from the others not only by rocks, though, but also by a seawall, too high to climb over, which meant we needed to walk on the roads, rather than along the shore, to get to the others.

Bagel Beach was just a slice of Woodmont, and Woodmont, too, was just a slice—a small mile-and-a-half stretch—of the city of Milford’s coastline. Connecticut’s abundant Irish came there as well, though in our area of Woodmont their homes were set back from the water, in the hills past the Jewish world. And there were “Yankees” there too, my father’s word for Protestants. But of course we didn’t mix. Nor did we mix with the people living in the neighboring shoreline boroughs, as dominated by gentiles as Bagel Beach was by Jews, places like Bayview Beach and Pond Point, populated for the most part by Italians, or Morningside, which was a Protestant place, and as closed to us—or so I’d heard—as if surrounded by a fence.

Yes, we were here, engaging like everybody else in a kind of segregated ethnic tribalism that for us was part necessity, part comfort. But my mother didn’t mean only that when she said, her voice confident, her chest filling with air,
Here.
She had her own sense of the place, which had to do with the past, with the summers she spent at Woodmont before her marriage. Though my father and Uncle Leo paid the yearly taxes and provided funds for upgrades, for Ada the men’s contributions never changed the fundamental fact of the sisters’ inheritance: the cottage was theirs. They’d grown up in it, they knew it best, they spent more days in it. They could look at the living room radio console and recall countless gatherings beside it to listen to the soap operas of their youth:
The Carters of Elm Street, Lorenzo Jones, As the World Turns.
They could open the dining room’s sideboard and point at the dishes, knowing which set was for milchidik, which for fleishadik. A given stain on a tablecloth was to them a particular shared memory that the men, the husbands of the weekend, knew nothing about.

It hadn’t changed. To grasp that constancy was the point of roaming, room by room, through the cottage. And once we’d been assured of that indelible sameness, the unpacking could begin. Off went the remaining white sheets covering beds and dressers. Out came the vacuum to gather three seasons’ worth of dust. There was the front porch to be swept clean and the kitchen table and counters to be wiped down. Soon enough, Davy had his second helpless jump on his summer bed, which with the cottage walls so thin he didn’t get away with for more than a few leaps. “Out!” my mother called, and she waited at the bottom of the stairs until Davy reluctantly trudged down them and made his way through the front door, onto our open front porch.

The sisters had yet to change out of their Middletown dresses, their hose, their almost identical brown shoes with practical one-inch heels, when they decided to walk down to the water. The Long Island Sound, too, needed to be seen and felt again. They needed to say hello to it and to hear, in the gentle, unending lapping of waves, a kind of voice they’d heard a million times before.

As I watched them make their way around the Isaacsons’ cottage and onto Bagel Beach I thought how ridiculous they looked, all dressed up like that, their good town shoes sinking into the sand and no doubt filling with it. Standing on our porch as they ambled forth, Davy—then and forever eight years old—was beside me. Howard had already gone off to meet his best Woodmont pal, Mark Fishbaum—the person I’d eventually marry and then divorce, though in 1948 all that was inconceivable. Nina was inside reading. As I stared ahead I noticed Mrs. Isaacson peeking through a back bedroom window that looked out on us. When I waved, she waved back. “Nice to see you, Molly,” she called, not at all uncomfortable with being found out. When Davy then said, “I’m going to build a new sand castle every single day,” I silently nodded. Glancing at the groupings of people on the beach, mothers and children in proper swim attire, many of them waving at the sisters as they made their entrance onto the summer scene, I was embarrassed for them. I was even more so when my mother bent over, grabbed a shoe, then stood straight as she tipped the shoe over, giving it a shake. “I’m going to build forts, too, and maybe I’ll let you hide in one,” Davy added. When I looked his way I noticed Mr. Weinstein two cottages over, one of the old radios he liked to fix set before him on a table on his porch. “And I’m going swimming, even in bad weather.” As Davy continued, my mother returned her shoe to her foot. Then she and Vivie marched on, determinedly, toward the water, though with a space of about two feet or so always between them.

The space made me wonder where my aunt Bec was, why she still hadn’t arrived yet. It was as if with that open air between them Ada and Vivie were holding a place for her, a niche Bec would fill perfectly, if only she were there.

Davy continued talking. My mother and aunt continued walking toward the water’s edge. Mr. Weinstein leaned over and twisted a knob on his radio.

Recently, this present year of 1999, my aunt Bec bequeathed to me her house. I’ll move in fully after the New Year; it seems right to make such a change at the start of a new millennium. But for now, this fall, I’m only making visits, getting to know the place anew, without Bec there. And the process—looking through Bec’s rooms, opening the trickle of mail that still arrives for her, beginning to sort through the contents of certain closets and drawers—has triggered another one, of trying to put the pieces of the summer of 1948 together as best I can. What, exactly, happened to that twelve-year-old girl so confident in her judgments that first day in Woodmont as she stood on the porch, watching? What happened to Davy, tragic as it is, is at least clear. But what happened to the rest of us—the ways our worlds collapsed, the ways we made sure they did—remains for me the mystery.