Family Secrets (5 page)

Bena finished the last stitch on her new wool dress and Mama heated the heavy iron in the fireplace to press out the wrinkles. Papa and Isaac came in and washed their hands, and then they all sat down to eat their last meal together as a family.

When they finished the meal the men went out in front of the house where it was cool to rest and talk, and Bena took a bath. “Your last bath until you reach America,” Mama said. “Soap yourself twice.”

Then she put on her new dress and the fine, new leather shoes Mama had bought to go with it. Becky watched Bena brushing her long, shiny hair, and wondered what she was thinking. She was so quiet. Well, it was a moment both happy and sad.

During the long trip in Mama’s wagon Mama treated Bena like a piece of glass. Don’t touch this, don’t touch that, don’t get yourself dirty. She wouldn’t even let Bena peel a piece of fruit; Becky had to do it for her. Bena sat stiffly in the back of the wagon, her hat on her head, the hamper strapped in beside her, looking straight ahead as if she were dead. Why, I would be singing, Becky thought.

None of them had ever seen anything so enormous as that ship—except Mama, of course, who had seen such a ship take away all her children but these two and Adam, who had been the first, the one who ran away. Imagine, Becky thought, he ran away and had no idea what he was going to find! She hardly remembered him because he had started running away when he was nine years old, first to another town, then to relatives, then home for Pesach, then away again, and finally when he was younger than she was now, to America.

Some men hoisted Bena’s hamper on board the ship. She had her ticket and her papers clutched in her hand, everything in order. Mama was smiling, but for the first time there were tears in her eyes.

“Go,” Mama said. She hugged and kissed her daughter. “Go.”

Bena just stood there.

“Hurry,” Mama said. “You’ll lose your luggage in all that crowd.” There were people pushing their way on board the ship, whole families with children and babies. Becky was looking for goats.

“Go, go,” Mama said.

Suddenly Bena turned very pale and she thrust her ticket and papers into Becky’s hand. “You go,” she said. “I’m not going.”

If she had been crying or hysterical they would not have believed her. They would have comforted her and finally pushed her up the gangplank, for Mama knew how to handle tears. But this calm Bena, this pale Bena with clenched teeth and out-thrust jaw, was a stranger to them. “I am not going, Mama,” Bena said in a low, firm voice. “I have thought about it and I will not go, I cannot go. If you make me go I will jump overboard and drown myself.”

“Bite your tongue!” Mama whispered.

“I mean it,” Bena said, and they knew she did.

“The papers … so long to get … the passage …” Mama was saying, but they were only words, for she was looking at Becky, looking up and down to see if she was suitable, if she could survive.

“Let me go, Mama!” Becky said. “Oh, please!”

“All those clothes …” Mama said sadly, looking at the hamper where it glistened in the sun on the deck with all those other, battered pieces of luggage from all the peasants.

“America is the land of milk and honey and I’ll grow fat in no time,” Becky said. “Then they’ll all fit me.”

“So young …” Mama said. She looked at both girls: the strong one who had turned weak and the weak one who had turned so unexpectedly strong. “All right,” she said. Her voice was decisive now, the voice both girls knew so well. “The papers say Bena Saffron, so Becky, you are Bena now. From now on you must tell everyone that is your name. When you get to Immigration you just show them your papers and they won’t pay any attention to you. You go to Adam’s house and you obey him just as if he were your Papa. You help with the home and the children and make yourself useful.”

“Yes, Mama.”

“God knows, that poor boy, he won’t want to marry you, expecting your sister, but Adam will find you someone else.”

Becky giggled.

Her Mama hugged and kissed her. “Maybe God has his plans,” she said.

Becky kissed her Mama and Bena, and then ran up the gangplank, worried the ship might leave without her. She stood at the rail as the ship pulled away, waving at her Mama as long as she could still see her in the crowd on the wharf. She was so excited that she didn’t feel the slightest bit homesick or sad. If she didn’t like it in America she could always come home. The truth was, she didn’t have the slightest idea how far away America was, or what she would find there, but she knew it would all be wonderful. God had his plans, and it had been planned all along by God that
she
would go. And all those lovely things in the hamper would be hers, and the happy life that went with them. She was Bena now, and she felt as if she had taken on her sister’s skin with her identity papers. She actually felt herself becoming pretty.

“Oh, thank you, God,” Becky-Bena breathed, and she had never been so happy in her life.

SIX

It was Lavinia who took the younger children to school on their first day, one by one, and Lavinia who named them. First her beautiful blonde sister: “When the teacher asks your name you tell her Melissa.”

“Why?”

“Because when you go to school you have to have an American name, and if you don’t say one she’ll give you one. How would you like it if you had a horrid name for the rest of your life?”

“Melissa.”

“Melissa Saffron.”

Melissa shrugged. She wasn’t anxious to go to school; she liked playing out of doors with her friends. There was never a child who had so many friends. She climbed trees and jumped rope, she made up little plays to act out with the other girls, she gave tea parties for her dolls and invited the whole neighborhood.

School was different for Melissa than it had been for Lavinia, for Melissa didn’t care. She hated studying and hardly ever did her homework, but because she was so pretty the teachers were partial to her. Whenever she did get hit she really didn’t seem to care; she loved to whisper to her friends and if she got caught, well, that was the price you had to pay. She loved to sing and dance, and dreamed of learning to play the piano. When the class sang “The Star-Spangled Banner” it was Melissa’s voice that soared out above the rest of them, a sweet, pure soprano. She was the essence of everything that was feminine, and if she stumbled over her reading or did not remember her multiplication table, her huge, guileless green eyes said that after all, what business did a little girl have with such matters?

Lavinia knew that Melissa was a fake. She was a little devil, and she was smarter than most of them, but she was lazy. She did exactly as much schoolwork as she had to, and she was always testing her teachers to see if she could get away with doing a little less. She was all energy and dreams. Yet, although she was so different from her sister, she adored Lavinia. They were very close, two sides of the same universe; one the sad, serious moon, the other the bright insouciant sun. Melissa knew that she had Papa and Mama and Lavinia and the world. Lavinia feared that she had no one. If Papa gave Melissa a smack for disobeying, Melissa knew it was only a smack. It was Lavinia who brooded over slights and injuries, who promised herself never to forget. Melissa cried whenever she couldn’t have her way. Lavinia never cried any more.

Lavinia loved books. It was from her books that she chose the children’s names. After Melissa came Hazel. Hazel neither looked nor acted like her two sisters. She had a flat, sullen face, with little bewildered eyes, neither green like Melissa’s nor brown like Lavinia’s, but a sort of muddy combination of both. She thrust her jaw out like a turtle, stubborn, slow. She couldn’t understand what they understood, and she was angry because no one waited to listen to her. But she was so slow! She could hardly get the words out. At first she screamed when she found herself ignored; later when she was older and stronger she devised a simple method of being noticed: like a turtle she snapped hold of the victim’s arm with her two strong hands instead of jaws, and held on until her mind and tongue could form the words, no matter that it was finally nonsense.

The family simply ignored Hazel’s problem. It was the easiest way, and they did not really understand it. Only Lavinia, “the orphan,” felt compelled to defend her. “She has a fat tongue,” she would say, and everyone accepted that.

The first-born boy was named Andrew by Lavinia, and that is what the family called him, except of course for the old witch, who was still living with them, and who called all the children by their Hebrew names except Lavinia. She called Lavinia “Orphan.” There was a curious bond of hate between Lavinia and her grandmother. Lavinia was the only one of the children who knew Yiddish, therefore she was the only child who could ever communicate with the old woman. She felt compelled to fight with her, and the old woman felt compelled to pick on this child, simply because she was an old woman whom everyone ignored. Her daughter Polly was dead, her son was dead, her youngest daughter, Lucy, lay panting and sickly in bed for weeks at a time, and her son-in-law kept her on in his house out of pity, not respect. The old woman knew this, and she knew that the only person who was in the natural order to receive less respect than she did was this argumentative child.

Although her life was ruled by superstitions she was clever. She knew that the matter of the orphan was between herself and the child and Lucy and Adam would not tolerate it, and so she kept it their secret, hissing “Orphan!” at this fierce little girl, pulling her braids, smirking when the child went running to her Papa to tell.

“Grandma pulled my hair again.”

“And what did you do to deserve it?”

“She was rude to me,” the old woman would say.

Adam would cuff Lavinia then, always taking the side of the older one, who was due more respect. “Don’t back talk your Grandma!”

“I didn’t!”

“She did, she did,” the old woman would crow. Why wouldn’t the child cry? She could see tears in the blazing little eyes, but the jaws would clench and the child would stand there rigid, glaring at her, wishing for her death, longing for the day she could pretend to cry at the old woman’s funeral.

Such hate! But it was better than being ignored, and at the end of a long life when one was lonely and ignored, it was interesting. If one could be hated then one was still worth reckoning with.

When Mama had a second boy, Lavinia began naming the children when they were born, without waiting for them to reach school age. She named this one Basil. She wanted the whole family to be American now, to fit in. Basil was a distinguished name, graceful. Basil Saffron … he could become a famous businessman. It was an English name, and it was also the name of an herb. Lavinia had found books about flowers in the school library.

When Mama had a little girl, Lavinia named her Rosemary.

“That’s a Catholic name,” Melissa said. “There’s a Catholic girl in my class and her name is Rosemary Feeney, and her family comes from Ireland.”

“Don’t be silly,” Lavinia said. “If she was Catholic she would be in a school with the nuns.”

Melissa chewed her lip. “I guess you’re right.”

“Rosemary happens to be the name of a beautiful-smelling herb,” Lavinia said. “It was a name celebrated in poetry and beautiful stories.”

“It’s pretty, anyhow,” Melissa said.

The photographer came to take a picture of all of them for their Papa’s thirty-sixth birthday. There was Papa, stern and distinguished, and next to him Mama, always frail, but having one of her better days. Beside them was Lavinia, then Melissa, with a great bow in her hair, and in front the smaller ones: Hazel, sturdy Andrew, Basil holding a ball, and little Rosemary, sitting on a chair holding her pet kitten. It was the gray and white kitten Basil had tried to cook by putting it into the oven in a pot, and it was only by luck that the servant girl had discovered it and saved its life. Now Rosemary wouldn’t let it out of her sight.

“Smile,” the photographer said. “Hold still. Look at the birdie.”

He would crouch under a black cloth and set off a flash of light and a puff of smoke, but there was no birdie. Lavinia didn’t like him because he was ugly. His skin was pockmarked and his teeth were broken and brown. Her Papa didn’t like ugly people, and neither did she. She wanted to be exactly like her Papa when she grew up.

Papa was very pleased with his birthday photograph, and had a large one made and framed to sit on top of his bureau. They were going to move to a private house in the spring, where there would be enough room for all of them including Grandma and Aunt Becky, and any greenhorns who came to stay for a while, and there would be a whole top floor just for the two Irish girls who worked for them now, cleaning the house and doing the laundry. In the new house they would have a grand piano in the living room, and on top of the piano there would be a fashionable fringed Oriental shawl, and on top of the shawl would be the framed photograph. None of them was smiling in it, no matter what the photographer said; they knew better than that. Suitably solemn and dignified, they were the very image of a refined, intelligent, prosperous American family.

Aunt Becky had been with them for a long time now. Lavinia remembered when she came, looking like a little girl, with a big box full of pretty dresses that were all much too big for her. Papa had gotten Aunt Becky a job in a factory, but she hadn’t liked it, and so she would come home in the middle of the day, saying: “I had a vision that one of you children fell out the window and so I had to rush home.” After doing that once or twice Aunt Becky would lose the job, and Papa would have to find her another one, but it was always the same. She would be back home by lunchtime, insisting she’d had “a vision.” Finally Papa just gave up and let her stay home. She learned English at night school, and Lavinia tried to help her, although she was too young to be of any real help. Mama helped Aunt Becky fix the dresses so they would fit, taking them in at the seams and shortening them. Aunt Becky told the children the story of Aunt Bena, how she wouldn’t get on the boat at the last minute and so Aunt Becky had come in her stead. The cousin who had been intended to marry Aunt Bena had taken one look at Aunt Becky and run away, which was fine as far as Aunt Becky was concerned because she didn’t like him either.