Broadway Baby (2 page)

Scene II

In the predawn dark, the train pulled out of South Station. Miriam had been looking forward to this trip all week, but now that it had started she began to wonder why her mother wanted her along. Sitting across from her, she watched her mother’s reflection in the window: in one hand, as always, a cigarette burned at the end of a long white holder while her other hand now and then turned the pages of the big account book in her lap.
Th
in threads of smoke swirled up from the tip of the cigarette and seemed to wave mournfully at the ghost threads in the window waving back at them. Miriam stared at her mother’s bent head floating on the darkness, the yellow curls meticulously tight and flat against her high forehead, the diamond-studded reading glasses perched on the tip of her long nose, and the sealed look of her thin lips, the no-nonsense don’t-be-a-bother-to-me look that Miriam knew by heart. She was the most beautiful and best-dressed woman Miriam had ever seen, even more beautiful there, reflected in the window where Miriam could watch her without her mother knowing. She looked like a starlet, though she had no interest in the stage, no interest in music or acting or anything, so far as Miriam could tell, but the store, and her customers, and the business trips to New York City she made so often. Whatever she did when she wasn’t working, Miriam had no idea. Her mother was a mystery, a little scary sometimes, but also because of this a little glamorous. But it drove Bubbie and Zaydie crazy how often she was gone, how unavailable she was, how little she had to do with any of them, with Miriam especially.

As the day brightened, she watched her mother’s image float there, fainter and fainter while the world passed through
it: warehouses, water towers with little ladders running up
the sides, a stockyard, some sort of soot-darkened factory or foundry with a giant smokestack gushing the whitest steam she’d ever seen, and then the back of apartment buildings just like the one she lived in with her grandparents.

“Do you think we’ll go to the
Follies
and see Fanny Brice, Ma?”

Her mother grunted. Miriam couldn’t tell if that meant yes or no.

Later, she was looking through her mother’s fading image at back porches strung with laundry, and families in the windows getting ready to go out, mothers and fathers and children, too, half-dressed, eating breakfast, moving from room to room. She had no memory of ever having lived with her mother, much less of her parents ever having lived together like a normal family. Try as she might, she couldn’t imagine it. And yet no one, not Zaydie or Bubbie, or her older cousins would ever speak about these things. Whenever she’d ask why her parents had gotten divorced, they’d shrug and change the subject. A family friend once had responded, “Why do cats hate fish and love water?”

Miriam had no idea how her mother, Tula Gore, owner of Tula’s, the most fashionable woman’s clothing store in Boston, could have fallen in love with Maury Bluestein, a butcher, a “peasant” butcher, a greenhorn, a schmo—wasn’t that what her mother called him?

Even Miriam was embarrassed by him on the rare occasions when he would show up at the apartment: shy, awkward, fretful, the opposite of everything her mother was. He’d stand there in the doorway, hemming and hawing, then put a box of something wrapped up in butcher paper in her hand. “For you,” he’d mumble. “Use it in good health.” No, no, he couldn’t come in, no, he wasn’t thirsty; he’d just have eaten, or he wouldn’t be feeling well and didn’t want to make her sick; maybe next time, maybe next time they’d go to lunch or to a picture. She knew her mother’s family didn’t like him. And she hated herself for feeling funny in his presence, uncomfortable, as if he stood for something bad in her. She’d stare at the stubby fingers of his clumsy hands, the butcher paper, the demoralized tie and jacket. He smelled like meat. She hated herself for the relief she felt when he was gone. It was easier to love him when the love was all anticipated or remembered, disentangled from the awkwardness of standing there together, looked at by the others, judged.

Once, before she knew any better, Miriam asked her mother why she and Papa didn’t live together. And Tula stared at Miriam for a long second before saying, “Do I look like a butcher’s wife?” No, she didn’t, but if you asked Miriam, she didn’t look or act much like a mother, either. None of Miriam’s friends had parents like hers—a father who visited maybe once a month and a mother who traveled so much on business that she didn’t live with her own daughter, never had, though Bubbie brought Miriam to the store each and every Saturday to be with her for a few hours, whether she wanted her there or not.

A
S THE HOUSES
with bigger and bigger yards slid by, Miriam thought about the store and the great nothing to do of her days there, learning to stay out of her mother’s way. She pictured the big gold letters of her mother’s name emblazoned on the giant window, and beyond the letters the women mannequins in their various poses: one with her hand on her hip, another with a cigarette holder raised halfway to her lips, all of them in wigs of different styles and colors, and all wearing the most marvelous dresses, as if they were royalty at a ball or wedding—halter gowns of crepe-de-chines, or satin, or the new satin look-alike her mother called rayon.
Th
e dresses shimmered dreamily behind the
golden letters of her mother’s name.

She wondered again why her mother wanted to take her on this “buying” trip, since she never had before, no matter how much Miriam had asked or begged—New York was Broadway, and the
Follies,
Fanny Brice and Al Jolson! But until last week, her mother had always said it was no place for a little girl, and anyway she had a business to run and didn’t have time to play when she was working. Someday Miriam would thank her for how hard she worked.

She studied her mother’s spectral features in the glass as if something in the tilt of her head, or the way the cigarette
holder seemed to rise to her lips mechanically on strings of smoke,
might somehow disclose the reason why her mother wanted her, this time, to come along.

Th
e train whistle blew and suddenly it seemed the sun rose high enough to blot out all traces of her mother in the window. As if the girl herself had caused the sun to shine too brightly, Tula glanced at Miriam, and then pulled down the shade, and in the semidark continued working. If they had been at the store now, Miriam would have hidden herself within the circular rack of the most expensive skirts and dresses, behind the big pleats and godets, the flaring drapery, the way she always did, so as not to be noticed spying on all the customers who came and went all day. She loved watching them fingering the fabric, taking this or that gown off the rack and holding it up against themselves before the triple panels of the full-length mirror beside the dressing room. It amazed her how those women would enter the dressing room stoop-shouldered or stumpy, lanky or fat, in clothes as humdrum as the women themselves, and emerge a few moments later utterly transformed—their shoulders square, their figures sharpened by the crosscutting of the fabric or hidden by the glittering lamé.

When she was hidden away, unnoticed, Miriam could love her mother best, her store voice, so knowing and confident, telling her customers about the dresses and who designed them and how elegant they made the women look, how perfect their “bosoms” seemed in such a style.
Th
ere was never any trace of the impatience and annoyance Miriam was used to. In her store, her mother sounded like a trusted friend, a confidante, someone who cared for nothing but the happiness of others. Tula would joke, too, about the absent men, the husbands, jokes that made the men seem like fools, like idiots, though how or why Miriam couldn’t quite say. “Oh darling,” her mother would exclaim, looking over her customer’s shoulder as the woman posed before the mirror, “don’t worry about the price! He’ll take out a second mortgage just to see you take this off.”

Now the train entered a tunnel and slowed to a stop. Her mother pulled up the shade and there she was again in the window, staring in and smiling. It was the same smile Miriam had seen at the store last Saturday. She had been on the phone with someone, and while she talked Miriam drifted to the back room where the mannequins were stored—everywhere there were naked bodies with bald heads, some lying on the floor, some leaning against the walls, others standing together like grown-ups at a party, except without wigs and clothes on they were indistinguishable. She touched one of them on the arm, ran her hand lightly over the swelling of the breast; it was smooth and cold and she didn’t understand what all the fuss was about, why the ladies who came to the store cared so much about their “bosoms,” and how the gowns and dresses showed them off or failed to. What was the big deal?

On that Saturday, from the back room, she could hear her mother talking—not as she usually did on the phone with businesspeople, saying she wasn’t going to “take a fucking,” and she would “cut his balls off if he tried to fuck her, did he understand that?” No, this time her voice was soft and low, and though Miriam couldn’t quite make out what the words were, it was pleasant to listen to them.

She concentrated so hard, Miriam still had one hand on a mannequin’s breast when she looked up to see her mother watching her. Her mother was smiling, her eyebrows raised.
Th
ere was something in the look that made her blush with shame.

“So, darling,” her mother had said then, “how about you come with me next week to New York City, just us girls, isn’t that what you’ve always wanted? We can paint the town and, while we’re at it, get your grandmother off my back—what do you say?”

I
T TURNED OUT
that the tunnel wasn’t just a tunnel; it was a station, too. And now a man entered the car and sat down next to her mother. He was tall and slender; he wore a shiny gray suit, gray fedora tilted back on his head. “Hi’ya doll face,” he said. “What do you hear, what do you say?” His name was Mr. Perez.
Th
e ring on his left hand glittered; it was like the one Zaydie wore, only bigger and brighter. When he smiled, his left eye seemed to close in a kind of slow wink. He gave Miriam a peppermint and called her Senorita, as if Senorita were her name. For the next few hours, they laughed a lot, Tula and Mr. Perez. Her mother kept touching his arm and laughing. She’d never seemed so warm, so much like a girl. When the train finally arrived at Grand Central Station, the man helped them with their bags to the taxi, then rode with them to the hotel, he and her mother in the backseat, Miriam up front with the driver.

“You stay here, Miriam, understand?” her mother said, seating her daughter under a massive chandelier in the giant hotel lobby. Miriam watched her mother and Mr. Perez disappear into a golden elevator. People hurried through the lobby every which way, some trailed by Negro porters pulling carts piled high with luggage—couples arm in arm, and men in dark suits and hats, swinging briefcases as they strode past, newspapers tucked under an arm.
Th
is was not the New York she had imagined; this was a New York full of Tulas and the men she talked with on the phone. If only Bubbie were here, they would have been sitting in the Ziegfeld theater watching Fanny Brice by now. Maybe they would have gone backstage to meet the stars themselves. And afterward, they would have walked hand in hand down Broadway, singing “My Man” or “My Mammy.”

Miriam must have dozed off, for when her mother and Mr. Perez returned, she wasn’t sure if she was still dreaming.
Th
ey seemed so happy, the two of them, happy and calm, and it embarrassed Miriam the way her mother held the man’s arm and how all through lunch in the hotel restaurant he would look at her mother and smile or kiss her on the neck.
Th
ey seemed to hardly know that Miriam was there; she could stare at them all she wanted.

Finally Mr. Perez said he had to go—“to see a man about a dog.”

“What kind of dog?” Miriam asked, as he left them, but her mother said, “Never mind. We got to get going.”

For hours then, they walked the city; her mother’s high heels made it difficult for Miriam to hold her hand and keep up with her long strides. Her mother kept pulling her along, now and then yanking her.
Th
e sidewalks were crowded; people rushing by kept jostling her.
Th
ere were bright jagged patches of sky overhead between the buildings and, down below, shadows as deep as night. An old woman in a baggy sweater and ripped scarves put her trembling hand out to touch her. “Stop gawking and keep moving,” her mother snapped. “Can’t you go faster?”

All afternoon, they went from factory to factory, up tiny elevators or dank stairwells, into high-ceilinged rooms—some full of rows of women at sewing machines that made the place hum like a giant beehive, some full of presses and mangles loud as gunfire. Everywhere there was the smell of smoke and leather.
Th
e men who worked the big machines seemed half-asleep; they looked up without seeing Miriam as she hurried past. At each place, she would sit in an outer office watching her mother through the glass as she talked with this or that man, sometimes laughing, sometimes arguing. At some point at each place her mother and the man would turn around and look through the glass at Miriam, and the man would shake his head or nod as if somehow the sight of the little girl had made some kind of point, or hadn’t.

Finally they came to a massive plate-glass window of a toy store on a busy avenue. Her mother said, “Stay here. Don’t move. I’ll be right back,” then disappeared into a doorway down the block. Miriam had never seen so many toys, too many to count: giant dollhouses, and dolls in the most stunning clothes, and tea sets with flowers delicately painted on the outside of the cups, the saucers rimmed with gold. An electric train ran through a winter village. She watched the small pistons shunting, and a thread of steam curl from the smokestack.
Th
ere were thumb-sized children skating on a pond, a fire station with a fire truck out front complete with ladder and hose, and a schoolhouse with dime-sized windows in which she could see children at tiny desks.
Th
e village of a storybook, a fairy-tale village.