As Close to Us as Breathing: A Novel (3 page)

This morning I wandered through Bec’s home, modeled so much after the cottage, and decorated just as modestly but for a rather fancy Victorian desk, the kind with little drawers and vertical compartments. The desk stands in a corner of the living room. Opening its drawers I felt a pang of guilt, for clearly this was a private spot of Bec’s, the corner nook, the window, and the lovely old desk, its drawers filled with letters, sketchbooks, scraps of paper, some with addresses on them, others with more of Bec’s sketches. In a bottom drawer the sketchbooks were older, the pages more yellowed. In one I found a page dated January 7, 1950, with some writing on it rather than drawing. This was a time, I recalled, when Bec was living with us, after Davy’s death. Singlehandedly, it seemed, she saved our family, pulled us through. In the sketchbook Bec’s handwriting was especially tiny, but I could see it clearly enough.
I could die,
she’d written.
No, no, am already dead.

When Bec finally did arrive at the cottage that Tuesday in 1948, close to dinnertime and in high spirits, it was the roar of her boss’s Buick Roadmaster, the only sound all afternoon louder than the background drone of waves, that first signaled to us that she was near. After Vivie and Ada had returned from the beach and finally changed their clothes, and after the cleaning and unpacking, and after my mother had at last called my father to let him know all was well, we’d gathered on the front porch where, for the most part, we were simply taking in the air. Only Howard was absent.

The Roadmaster was a gleaming red and white sedan, so much fancier than our faded green Dodge with its many rust spots. The year before, Bec’s boss, Tyler McMannus, had also dropped her off, but not in as glorious a vehicle. This day he parked the Roadmaster beside our Dodge and honked a greeting. Then he got out and tipped his hat to us, calling, though not particularly loudly, “Hello, ladies,” to Ada and Vivie as he did. Slowly, because of his slight limp—the remains of a war injury that had brought him home earlier than anticipated from Europe—he walked around the car. Bec sat inside it, waiting, familiar with the routine. We’d seen it before too. When Tyler reached her, he opened the car door and then held Bec’s arm as she stepped out. For a second, he held her gaze.

Bec looked elegant in a short-sleeved red dress, belted in white, with a coordinating white collar and white trim around each sleeve. Oddly, her colors matched the Roadmaster’s perfectly. After turning from Tyler she raced up the porch steps, singing out our names. As she spun around, spewing hellos, her skirt twirled with her. That she’d made the dress was a certainty, for Bec was a master seamstress. In New Haven she worked in Tyler McMannus’s dress shop, and by all accounts its upper-crust clientele were especially fond of the garments Bec designed and sold there. She was so good, in fact, that Tyler gave her eight weeks each summer at the beach with her sisters—whatever it took to keep his most valuable employee happy, he’d explained to us on more than one occasion.

As Bec greeted everyone, Tyler remained by the car and watched. He seemed genuinely pleased for Bec, smiling throughout the welcoming period. Once things quieted down on the porch Tyler joined us and soon stood beside Bec, his fedora in his hands, his suit jacket unbuttoned, the limp that you couldn’t help but notice as he climbed the porch steps no longer so apparent, his near-black hair and gray eyes glinting as a ray of late-afternoon sun landed on him. “Quite a day, yes?” he said as he thrust his hand out to shake Ada’s, then Vivie’s.

When Bec stepped closer to him, she too was caught in the sun’s light and there they stood, two exceptionally well-tailored individuals whose smiles, when they looked at each other the next moment, were almost as bright as the sunshine they momentarily basked in. It would be decades before I understood the extent to which they were in love with each other that summer. In fact by that day Tyler, though still married, had proposed that he and Bec start a life together in New York City, but even as I watched them on the porch, in all the ignorance of twelve years old, it seemed to me that one could only wish to be just like them, so well put together, so well matched.

Though on vacation, Bec still had a little sewing to do while she was at the beach, and on several Fridays she’d have to go back to New Haven for any fittings that couldn’t be delayed until early fall. Because of this she’d brought her Singer, which Tyler awkwardly lugged up the porch steps then carried to Bec’s sunporch. He quietly hummed as he hauled in next her suitcases and her large sewing basket. Tyler granted Davy the privilege of carrying in Bec’s mannequin—Eleanor Roosevelt, we proudly called her—that she couldn’t work without.

Minutes before Tyler left—without fanfare, the only sign of anything between him and Bec his left arm dangling out the car window, extending back—Bec was the one to shoot down the porch steps and whisk from the car one last item. From a hanger flowed a dress, pale yellow with small white flowers on it, covered by a short jacket of the same material.

Once she’d carried it to the porch she held it out to Nina. “Strapless,” Bec explained, pushing the jacket back, revealing the dress. “Made it for you,” she said, excited for Nina. As she thrust it at Nina, Bec added, eyebrows raised, “Could change your life. Dresses do that, you know. They really do.”

By dinnertime the sisters were wearing nearly identical outfits: floppy cotton housedresses. Even Bec. Yes, I saw, dresses
could
change your life, and so much for the better.

And with the return of their casualness we were most definitely
here.

The next day, Wednesday, the sisters rose early for a quick dunk in the Sound then spent the rest of the morning around the kitchen table talking to Mrs. Isaacson, who came by with a freshly baked coffee cake and ten months’ worth of news. She’d brought along her granddaughter Judy, too, who was in her second year of a failing marriage and needing a break from it. Everyone knew it was Mrs. Isaacson’s great hope that Judy would eventually have as loving a marriage as she and Mr. Isaacson had had—“Fifty-two years and still French-kissing,” as she put it—but we could all see that even though Judy was pregnant, there was no real joy in her life. She passed on the cake, endlessly stirred her black coffee, said nothing.

When Mrs. Isaacson was finally through talking, the sisters set off for a walk, starting along the roads between Bagel and Anchor Beach. Even when they turned off the road and scrambled over the rocks that abutted the shoreline at Anchor Beach, slowing to a crawl to do so, they acted like they didn’t know that Davy and I were right behind them, having our own walk, collecting shells and gull feathers and the occasional starfish along the way.

During the afternoon, after lunch and a smoke on her sunporch, Bec began to sew, a party dress, she said, for a Mrs. Arthur Coventry of New Haven. She was the wife of a retired law professor from Yale. A little hoity-toity, like so many of those Yale wives, Bec noted, but nice. Though we couldn’t know it then, as she sat at the Singer that afternoon Bec was contemplating, as she’d been since Tyler had voiced it a week before, his proposal. (“We could be happy in New York. I know that. I believe that, Bec,” he’d said.) The proposal wasn’t for marriage—he was Catholic and couldn’t find it in himself to divorce—but she knew it was for a lifelong commitment all the same.

That day Nina stayed on the porch, reading Darwin. The hefty book was clearly an endless read and summer would be gone, I worried, before she’d come to the beach with me. I was hoping she and I would be close, like we’d been the summers before, and like the sisters were that morning, their eyes flashing signals to each other about the silent Judy as Mrs. Isaacson yakked on, and later, their heads bent toward each other while they chatted during their walk; and even like Howard and his pal Mark Fishbaum, an only child always eager for company, who showed up that first full day for both breakfast and lunch. In the morning Howard sailed with Mark, who had a twelve-foot Sailfish to launch, but after lunch the two parted and Howard set off for Treat’s produce stand on the outskirts of Woodmont where he hoped to get a part-time job. “Noon to four thirty,” he proudly announced that evening as we gathered outside on the porch for supper.

Davy followed Howard’s news with some of his own. Over the summer he’d be working too, he told us. But he didn’t sound as happy as Howard. What he meant was that he expected mail soon from Lucinda Rossetti, who that past year had been in his second-grade class in Middletown. Their teacher had assigned the students a summer project: they would pair up and share in drawing a picture. One of them would draw a portion of it then pass it to the other, and so forth. “She broke the rules,” he complained about his teacher, a woman who, until that moment, it seemed he’d simply adored. “There’s no homework in summer. Everybody knows that.”

“Buddy, there’ll come a day when you actually
like
that girls send you things,” Howard told him with an assurance born of the fact that Howard rarely went without a girlfriend, though just then he was single.

Nonplussed, Davy had no answer to that.

The next day our first piece of mail in fact arrived, a white envelope that hailed, ominously for Davy, from Middletown. We kids were in the kitchen eating lunch when Bec wandered in, holding the thing.

To Davy’s relief Bec handed the envelope to Nina, who promptly tore it open and read out loud her father’s words:
There are so many mysteries to life, Nina. Darwin looked hard, and looked for a long time, and in the end, it seems to me, he figured out one of the biggest of them all. I look forward to talking with you about him—soon enough.
“Nice,” she said, folding Leo’s note and tucking it, like a second bookmark, into the thick pages of
On the Origin.
She nodded before repeating, “Nice.”

“See? Mail’s fun,” she then told Davy. “Ever get any? Just for you?”

“I’ve never gotten a letter,” Davy acknowledged.

Later that afternoon Davy, Nina, and I ran into Sal Baby, known to adults as Sal Luccino, the local Good Humor man—the person who, come Friday of the third week of August, would run his truck over Davy. As we walked on Hillside Avenue toward Sal and his wares we could see that Sal was breaking up a tussle between the Weinstein twins. One of them, Jimmy Weinstein, already had an ice cream bar in hand and despite the tears running down his face had just taken a first bite. The other boy, Arthur Weinstein, had a bloody nose. “If you can stay out of trouble for the next week I’ll give you a free one,” Sal was telling Arthur as he mopped up the blood with a paper napkin. He did this while holding a lit cigar in his left hand. Once we’d arrived at his truck, Sal glanced our way, winked hello, puffed at the cigar, and then resumed his negotiations with Arthur Weinstein. Ten minutes and five bloodied napkins later we at last got our Good Humor bars.

By late Thursday afternoon, after Howard had come home from Treat’s, clouds gathered and my mother stood on the beach, admonishing Howard and Mark, and then begging them, not to go sailing. “Can’t you two play cards?” she asked almost desperately. “Or help Mr. Weinstein over there with his radio?” But sail they did, out past Bagel Beach, over toward Anchor Beach, where they slid past Signal Rock, then past Crescent Beach then Long Beach, and finally they were beyond Woodmont altogether, sailing through the border of West Haven, which for them was uncharted territory, a place of friendly enough coastal waters but unknown depths.

In the photo of Maks and Risel of June 1939 they were sitting at the beach, hand in hand, looking more toward each other than the camera. Earlier that day, following the affixing of mezuzot throughout the cottage, the two had celebrated paying off the mortgage in yet another way. Risel, this time, had the idea. Heavyset and prone to napping, she nevertheless scuttled, breasts and belly jiggling, down to the shore. She was still in her Shabbos dress and her seamed stockings, though she’d taken off her heeled shoes even before the last mezuzah was hung. In her hand were the mortgage papers, rolled and jammed into an empty Coca-Cola bottle, its cap secured with adhesive tape. The tide was out. My grandfather, delighting in the cool but bearable touch of the shallow waters of low tide, the soft ridges of wet sand under his feet, the renewed energy of his typically sedentary wife, followed Risel as she waded out to where the waters were knee-deep. There she stopped, her hem drenched, her stockings ruined, her waist twisted, and with the expertise of a discus thrower she heaved the bottle into the sea. Then she whooped with joy and splashed her husband. But Maks only stood there quietly, a yard or so from Risel, watching the bottle bob as it drifted from them. At last, the bottle gone from sight, he stepped closer to Risel and grabbed the hand that had done the hurling. For some time they stood there, staring at the hazy and distant line of the horizon. Above them gulls flew, as always, and by their legs a jellyfish floated past, barely noticeable as it swayed with the sea’s mixed currents. Time was a strange thing, Maks muttered to Risel, pulling her close. And by that he meant that it seemed impossible they’d been married forty-four years.

Friday morning was a simple enough matter. Howard, who’d been up carousing with Mark Fishbaum the night before, was late taking off to join the morning minyan in Middletown. When he finally pulled the Dodge onto Hillside Avenue to begin his drive to Middletown he thought he was still dreaming, for there was Davy, yawning as he stood roadside at the mailboxes, waiting hours too early for the day’s mail to arrive.

On his hand he wore his favorite puppet, Samson, the boy in a family of puppets we’d named after our beach. Lenny Bagel. Esther Bagel. Linda Bagel. Samson Bagel. Brilliant, we’d thought, to name them so aptly: the Bagels of Bagel Beach.

B
y 1948 Sal Luccino had been smoking cigars for the dozen years that he’d been a Good Humor man. A Milford native who’d been trained by his father in the art of plumbing, Sal had split from the family business, Giuseppe Luccino & Sons, in 1936, when he was forty and had socked away enough money for the down payment, seventeen hundred dollars, for his own Good Humor franchise and a truck. The first cigar, smoked the day he signed the papers for the franchise, was a means of celebrating his independence, as was the second, smoked at ten in the evening when he finally parked his truck in front of his home after his first day of making rounds. He’d begun the day promptly at nine that morning. Independence, he discovered right away, came with a price—those daunting hours—but he was determined to make a go of it, and after that first day the cigars were smoked because they made him feel less alone inside his cab, like his father and brothers were right there beside him, just as they were when they fixed the pipes of the buildings in downtown Milford. Quickly, then, the cigars became a habit, and soon enough, for old times’ sake, he even called them “pipes.” “Not fixing the pipes anymore,” he told his wife, Marie, and all five of their children on a Sunday morning in July of 1936, one month after he’d begun his new work. In four weeks he’d cleared eighty-seven dollars, more than he’d ever made before. He held his cigar proudly for them to see. It being Sunday, he’d gone to mass then taken the rest of the morning off. “No, not fixing pipes. Just smoking ’em now,” he’d said. The work of the ice cream franchise ran from late April through mid-September, and in fact he returned to fixing pipes during the other months, when the families remaining off-season in the shoreline boroughs of Milford didn’t want to rush outdoors for something even colder than the weather. But once he’d adjusted to being a Good Humor man—driving and maintaining his truck, meticulously dressing each morning in pressed whites, ringing those luring bells, and chatting it up with his customers, the world’s children—his months as Sal Baby, as he’d come to be called, were by far the better part of the year.

He’d been the one who’d first offered himself to others as Sal Baby. August of 1937, a second summer of the new franchise almost gone, and a group of six kids—all from the Monroe family of Morningside—had begged him to “whistle it more, please,” as the youngest, a child of four, had put it. At the time Sal hadn’t even realized he was whistling. But that’s how whistling was for him—like breathing, he simply found himself at it. He’d even learned the hard way, through the cries and complaints of his own children to keep it down at night or he’d keep them up. But here in the streets of the Milford shoreline, the ocean gleaming in the distance, the open sky above, he’d belted it out for all six sandy-haired Monroes to hear. While he did, the children’s faces were transfixed, so much so that three out of the six didn’t even notice the melted chocolate dripping onto their hands. Even when he finished his song the children’s expressions of joyful wonderment didn’t change. “Sal Baby thanks you,” he told them with a wink. They repeated the phrase, “Sal Baby,” and while doing so each had laughed. So he tried out another phrase. “Bye-bye, apple pie,” he said, and without a moment’s hesitation they repeated that too.

Something settled over Sal that day, a sense of well-being, of knowing that this idea of his, the small business of selling treats, was the work he didn’t even know he was made for. The realization hit him first as he watched Mrs. Monroe, concerned that her children hadn’t returned home yet, come fetch them and urge them off, which did nothing to dissipate the cloud of sweetness surrounding them. The next January, 1938, while frantically fixing the pipes of a downtown apartment building after an unusually deep freeze had caused a riot of bursting, Sal, once again of Giuseppe Luccino & Sons, sat back on his heels, the bones of his arms and shoulders aching, his throat dry, his breathing shallow from bending at the waist as he worked. An image came to mind of the youngest Monroe child, Tommy, the one who’d said, “Whistle it more, please,” who, later, his mother clasping one of his messy hands, had strained to keep his head turned toward Sal long after his mother pulled him away. For a moment Sal was there, on the shoreline street, the sun blazing above, the child so impressed Sal could have told him he was the one to have invented ice cream and the kid would have believed him.

He put his wrench down. He looked around at the dim cave of the basement where he’d spent the better part of the morning. The place was unheated. On his hands were woolen gloves, clipped so his fingers were free. Three more months, he told himself, and then he’d be back at it. Outside. Breathing deeply. Whistling whenever the spirit moved him to. And, when it did, letting it rip.

That Friday of our family’s first week in Woodmont Sal was doing just that, letting it rip, as he drove to New Haven to restock, and that’s when he passed Davy, waiting for the mail, wearing shorts, a puppet, and a pajama shirt that in his sleepiness he didn’t realize was inside out. And, as if I were Sal that day, I can see Davy, all these years later, so very clearly. I can even hear him call “Sal Baby!”—his voice still the chirp of a child, his words a little rushed. And there we—the family members—were those early days of summer, swirling around him, each of us bathed in a light of innocence we didn’t even know was there. Davy’s innocence, the fact of his still being a child, wasn’t the light’s source. I talk of a grander innocence. Unlike my grandfather Maks during his days in Russia, in America we’d been lucky so far. Even the recent war, in all its anguish, hadn’t broken our spirit, and in fact that summer, 1948, we were particularly hopeful, given Israel and all. “I’m free!” Davy cried while jumping on his bed, the words nearly his first upon our arrival at Woodmont that summer. And as I sit here now, once again at Bec’s desk, staring for a second day in a row at that fraught note she wrote so long ago, after that innocence faded, here’s what I sense: that at the summer’s start Davy’s words were true for each of us, though not for the same reason, and that all of this—the different ways we found and grabbed at our freedom—had so much to do, ultimately, with this boy’s death.

But when the going is good, when the day is light and sunny, how can you not grab at freedom?

Take my mother, for example, who, in ways not so different from her nemesis-to-come, Sal Luccino, didn’t even know she had.

“This is where I feel I can breathe,” my mother always said of Woodmont—always showed as well—and it was there, in the cottage with her sisters each summer, that I would watch the usual knot of her brow unwind, the taut vein lines in her neck slacken, the apron strings, inevitably wound round her waist in our Middletown kitchen, fall by the wayside. Wearing her daily housedress, one of her many shapeless cotton shifts, her mass of hair pinned haphazardly behind her head, and her beloved wedge sandals, oddly stylish given the rest, she could look almost comic. Yet she was content, even happy. For in Woodmont she gained a kind of autonomy over her life, something she lacked in Middletown. For one thing, as co-inheritor of the cottage, she was on her own turf. And she loved that ownership, loved taking stock of the place at the beginning of each summer, scouring the building—as my father did in our Middletown home—for any needed repairs, any further upgrades. She even loved the smaller acts of day-to-day maintenance such as sweeping the cottage’s ever-sandy front porch. On many a morning I would find her there, humming. When she finished, she’d lean the broom against a wall, sit herself down on one of the porch’s chairs, and hum—as she never did while doing housework in Middletown—even louder.

Then again, at Woodmont the daily work of cooking, cleaning, shopping, and watching over us was shared. That was another feature of summer so different from life in Middletown. Our cottage was a kind of commune, and if my mother ever had any ambitions outside the home, the live-in help she had at Woodmont in the form of her sisters could have allowed her the time for it. She could have taken up painting watercolors, for example, or studied shorebirds. Like Nina, she could have read an extremely long book. But Ada had no such ambitions. Years ago, when she’d used her keenest wiles to steal my father from Vivie, she realized all the ambition she’d ever had. She’d got her man. Her life, she knew then, despite the eighteen years of it already lived, was about to begin.

Odd, then, how during those childhood summers the five weekdays when the men weren’t there were the most relaxed of her adult life. I remember the sound of her waking each morning, early, not long after daybreak, along with Vivie and Bec. That Friday morning of our first week was no different. I was still snuggled under the cotton blanket on the sofa bed I shared with Nina, my eyes heavy with sleep, when I heard the creaking upstairs begin. Even before there was any movement in the boys’ room it was clear that at the front of the house Ada had risen. At the other end of the upstairs hall Vivie had too. In the sunporch beyond the living room Bec was rising, and the glass doors separating her room from Nina’s and mine squeaked as she opened them to make her way to the toilet near the back door. Soon she returned, and in what I imagined as perfect synchrony the three sisters then stepped into their identical bathing suits, black one-piece suits with skirts that covered the tops of their thighs. These were their morning suits, to be replaced later by lighter-colored ones, or even floral-printed ones, suits that they would wear in lieu of underwear under their inevitable housedresses. But the black suits were what they stepped into each morning for what they referred to as their daily dunk.

For all their years at the beach their parents had dunked, first thing in the morning, walking hand in hand from the cottage porch, around the Isaacsons’ cottage in front of them, to the sands of Bagel Beach, and finally to the water’s edge. When Maks and Risel died, they bequeathed to their daughters not just the cottage and its contents but also so many years of Woodmont-only traditions: the cottage cheese and fresh fruit salads Risel favored for lunch, the Saturday evening rounds of rummy, the early-morning dunk.

The stairs, creaky as the cottage’s floors, squeaked as my mother and Vivie descended, towels and bathing caps in hand. My eyes still heavy, I didn’t have to actually see them to know what was under way. At the base of the stairs Vivie and Ada stopped, leaning over the banister to check on Nina and me. At the same time, Bec, also carrying a towel and cap, emerged once again from her porch. The sisters paused briefly in the dining room to greet each other, whispering a hushed but audible “morning” before they scurried out the back door and began making their way, their legs and arms, chests and backs exposed, as they strutted forth in their bathing suits, which, at this time of day and this time of day only, went uncovered. If you were to stare out a window you could see that they were nearly the same height, though Bec was a little taller than the others, and that Vivie had noticeably wider hips, and that my mother’s waist was the trimmest, despite her having borne the most children. You would see each of them holding her head high, her posture straight, her near-black mane still braided from the night before and falling past her bare shoulders onto the skin of her upper back. You would see they were lovely, the three of them, as they walked silently through the misty grayness of the early morning air.

But at six thirty a.m. who was up to see? Thus the exposed swimwear and skin, the goose bumps rising on their arms, the determined pace. For this was business, this dunking, this daily reminder of Maks and Risel, this morning prayer—a form of Kaddish, really, except the practice, silent, was wholly physical—and a moment later the sisters dropped their towels, tipped their heads, and began the synchronized stuffing of those thick manes of hair inside their snug rubber caps.

But that synchronicity—a kind of peace—wasn’t always the case. My mother was seventeen when she betrayed Vivie, who then didn’t speak to her for the next five years. The undoing began when Vivie, who was twenty at the time, was laid low with the flu. This was during the winter of 1926, and Vivie was incapacitated for a good three weeks. Bec, too, was sick. But my mother had a hardiness to her and never took ill. Instead, she acted as house nurse, a role she enjoyed, carrying pitchers of juice and water to her sisters’ bedside tables, taking their temperature, buttering their slices of toast, rushing to answer their throaty calls.

Her mother, Risel, couldn’t have been more grateful for this invincible girl, her darling Ada, the middle child who happened to also have the most charming face and a lively, headstrong personality. During those long weeks Risel’s thankful adoration was a kind of pampering, as steady as the pampering Ada offered her sisters. The approval bolstered what was already in Ada, due to those striking looks and that outgoing disposition: a healthy dose of self-confidence. And so my mother was grander than usual, as well as more purposeful than usual in her role as nurse. High school, which she’d been missing those weeks while her sisters needed her, already seemed a thing of the past, despite the four months of it still looming. But with the business at home Ada began to see beyond her school days, when she’d be expected to take a job, a caring job, much like the house nurse position she’d stumbled into, and then, soon enough, find a husband and start a family—which, as everyone knew, was any woman’s real job, her future permanent position. Vivie, who upon graduating from high school had taken a part-time post at Leibritsky’s, in downtown Middletown, was certainly on the same path, just a bit ahead of Ada. And every other young woman Ada knew, or knew of, also trekked that very path. It was at Leibritsky’s that Vivie had met Mort, the owner’s eldest son, who worked there with his father. For the last three months, on Saturday nights following Shabbos, Mort had come by to court Vivie. Twice they’d sat completely alone, just the two of them, in the Syrkin living room, quietly conversing. Once they’d gone out to see a picture show.