Family Secrets (7 page)

Becky had married Isman Levine and was living in the Bronx with him and the three children they had had, three in four years. Isman’s business, the one Adam had set him up in, had failed. It was due to the war, everyone said sympathetically, but Adam knew better. The man had turned out not to be a manager at all. But Becky was not young, she was not pretty, she was not rich, she was not exactly a catch, and at least Isman had a good character. So Adam set him up with another small store, this time shoes. People always needed shoes, and it would be as easy to get rid of his stock as it would be to dispense bread to the hungry.

But somehow that didn’t seem to work either. The bookkeeper juggled the funds, the customers stayed away. “What did you expect?” said sharp-tongued Lavinia. “Getting a man with a limp to manage a shoe store! People will think he limps because the shoes pinch.”

So Adam found Isman a job in a company owned by a friend who owed him a favor. A small job, one not requiring managing ability or even initiative. He was to do as he was told, and since Isman was ever eager to please, he would fit in well. He would never become a rich man now. But at least his children would not starve. Adam hoped Isman and Becky would restrain themselves and not have any more children.

Lucy was not well. She spent more and more time in bed, fighting for breath, and the doctor said she should have sea air. So she went to the seashore, accompanied by a widowed cousin and a maid. When she came back, no better, the doctor said mountain air was what she needed. So Lucy packed up the cousin and the maid and went to a resort hotel in the mountains. She could not even take her youngest, Rosemary, for the care of a child was too much for her in this exhausted state. Besides, Rosemary was at school all day now, and it was not good for a child to miss any of her education.

All the children took piano lessons, even the boys. Lavinia did as she was told, although she did not enjoy it, and rather fancied herself playing a mandolin. Melissa adored piano and had a natural talent. She could play both from sheet music and by ear, and liked to sing while she was playing. She dreamed of going on the stage. Her idol was Isadora Duncan, the Divine Isadora, and she liked to dress in flowing scarves and dance around the house, pretending she was already a star. She had grown up to be the beauty in the family. Her blonde wavy hair hung to her waist, and her large green eyes were set off by naturally dark lashes. She was slender and graceful, although not skinny, and boys already liked her, though luckily she couldn’t care less for them.

Hazel was so hopeless at the piano that Adam decided to stop wasting money on her, hoping instead that she could just manage to get through grade school. She was thirteen and in the fifth grade. She could read and write, but her mind wandered, she could not manage her homework, she could not speak in class. She could neither cook nor sew. It would all have been bearable if she had been an ornament, but she was plain; and she was sullen and ill-tempered because she was just intelligent enough to know that she could not do what the others did, and that none of them had the patience to wait for her.

“Why doesn’t anybody listen to me?” Hazel screamed once in one of her rare moments of coherence. “I’m not stupid! You all think I’m stupid, but I’m not.”

“Of course you’re not,” Lavinia said. The others said nothing.

It was assumed that Andrew and Basil would go to college, then hopefully to law school, and then join their father in his businesses. There was not to be a doctor or a dentist in the Saffron family; a good doctor or a dentist you could hire, but every family needed a good lawyer of its own, loyal, honest, devoted, and filled with initiative.

As for the girls, they would marry. All of them had good characters, come from a strict moral upbringing, and each of them had some special quality of her own. Lavinia was exceptionally bright. Melissa was as pretty and graceful as a fairy princess. Hazel was easy to please. And little Rosemary was a musical genius. Only seven and a half, and she could play “The Minute Waltz,” imagine! Her little fingers couldn’t even reach an octave, but how they moved! And of course, God willing, they would all grow up to be rich, so it would not be hard to find them good husbands.

Lavinia, however, had plans of her own.

“Well, now, Lavinia,” Adam said to her, a week before her graduation from high school, “You know I never give birthday presents because I can’t remember birthdays and I think they’re foolish, but a school graduation is a big event. So, you tell me what you want, whatever it is you’re dreaming of, and I’ll give it to you.”

“Anything?” Lavinia said.

“Anything. You want even a motor car, I’ll buy you one.”

“All right,” Lavinia said, “I would like you to pay my tuition at college.”

“College?” He was amazed. “Why do you want to go to college?”

“I want to study psychology.”

“What’s that?”

“It’s a new science.”

“Science? We have a scientist in the family?” He was amused, but good-natured about it. After all, he had given her his word. “So how much does it cost, NYU or Hunter?”

“I’m going to Cornell.”

“Cornell?” he said. “Where is that?”

“Ithaca, New York.”

“Ithaca? Ithaca? Two days by train, you’ll sleep away from home, you’ll live in a strange place by yourself? What if you get sick? I won’t allow it.”

“I’ve already applied,” Lavinia said calmly, “and I’ve been accepted. I will live in a dormitory with other girls, and older chaperones. I’ll be perfectly safe.”

“Chaperones?” he said. “There are boys there, too?”

“Of course. It’s a university. But they have their own dormitories and they can’t come in to bother the girls. Papa, I’m going to college to study, to get a degree, not to meet boys. I can meet boys at home.”

“I never said it was wrong to want an education,” he said. “I always admired intelligent people. But you’re a girl—a girl doesn’t go away from home to live with strangers.”

“I want to go to college, Papa. I want to go to
this
college. I sent for all the booklets and this one has the best psychology department. Please.”

“To go away from home …”

“You went away from home when you were younger than I am now, and you went much farther away.”

“Nu, so a boy is different.”

“These are modern times, Papa.”

He was thinking. He had made up his mind, but still, it was good to wait, to see what she would say, if she was really sure about this. She waited too, calmly: she was wise to him, she knew his ways and she knew he admired her. “And if I don’t pay this tuition?”

“Then I’ll have to get a job. I can wait on tables at college, other girls do. And I can apply for a scholarship. My marks are high enough. It’s too late for this term, but I can work this term.”

“A waitress? Adam Saffron’s daughter a waitress?”

“And of course I’d have to wash dishes too,” Lavinia added casually. “But I’m quite good at that.”

“With two maids at home you want to wash dishes.”

“I want to have a degree in psychology from Cornell.”

He looked at her, his little spitfire, his third son. He noticed that she had grown up to be quite pretty, with a softness to her face that compensated for the shrewdness that sparked from her eyes and burned everyone it landed on. The boys would chase her. But he was secure in the way he had brought up all his girls, and he knew she would stay out of trouble. He knew perfectly well that Lavinia would wash dishes all night, every night, if it gave her what she had set her heart on.

“All right,” Adam said. “I’ll pay for your college.”

“Oh, thank you, Papa!” She flung her arms around his neck, the way she had when she was a little girl.

“And see that you study hard and get good marks,” he said, pretending to be stern, but he already knew that she would.

NINE

Lavinia knew that they were the elite. In the evenings, snuggled in flannel nightgowns and robes and slippers, homework finished, they would all sit in someone’s room, six or seven of them, gorging on packages from home, giggling, gossiping. They were college girls. That meant not only that they were bright, but that they had guts. They had all come here from far-away places, some of them from as far as the South, most of them over the protests of their anxious parents. Most of them were homesick. In the first month she was at Cornell Lavinia chose her group of closest friends, the girls she would be close to for the next four years. They were not all from the same background as hers. Some of them were not even Jewish. Two of them were on scholarships, which made her respect them more because they had to be bright. One of them was from her own neighborhood in Brooklyn, and one of them was from Alabama. Only one other girl besides Lavinia was a psychology major, and she changed her mind after the first term and switched to English. None of them really planned to teach when they graduated; they had simply come to learn. And that was what, in Lavinia’s mind, made her group of friends the elite, because they cared about knowledge for knowledge’s sake.

There were serious girls who seemed almost angry, who did not try to look clean and neat and who never smiled. Lavinia kept away from those girls, who always seemed to have something to protest, some cause to get riled up about. They had come to college out of a kind of vengeance for having been born female, or poor, or ugly, and they made Lavinia nervous. Then there were the frivolous girls, who had come to college to get away from home and have a good time. They chased the boys and spent very little time thinking about their studies. They were known as wild, and Lavinia avoided them too, because she was scrupulous about her reputation.

Although she loved her friends and enjoyed her classes, there were times when Lavinia was so homesick she wondered why she hadn’t chosen a school near home, so she could eat dinner every night with her own family instead of slops in that cold dining room, and sleep in her own warm bed instead of that hard, lumpy one. But then, on cold clear mornings, with the white snow shoulder high and the sky so blue, muffled up to the eyes in her wool scarf, her hat pulled down to her eyebrows, she would peer out at this academic world that had become her world and she would feel a great joy. She wondered if there would ever be time to read all the psychology books that had been written, time to unlock all the mysteries of human behavior. All her life Lavinia had been told that people were as they were, either good or bad, but now she knew it was not so. People could be shaped.

She was not yet ready to understand herself, because so much of it was so painful, but she knew that in time she would.

It was in college that Lavinia learned about sex. She had always known about sex in the sense that men and women got married and had babies: Mama had had all her babies at home and although no one but the midwife had been allowed into the bedroom, the children accepted pregnancy and birth as natural happenings of life. Rosemary’s kitten had grown into a cat, had had litters, and they in turn had grown up, all of them a nuisance, those which did not run away had to be given away. But beyond the fact that birth was a natural part of life, Lavinia did not know much else, and there was no one at home to ask. Mama would have been too embarrassed. It was out of the question to ask Papa, because he was a man and both he and Lavinia would have been too embarrassed. The only thing he ever said about sex was when he told Melissa: “If I find out that any of my daughters is not a virgin, I’ll throw her out of the house.” This was because Melissa was so popular, and Lavinia was a little annoyed that such unnecessary advice had been given to innocent, prudish little Melissa when she was the older one, the one who was about to go away from home into the dangerous world. Did Papa think she was
that
ugly, that boys wouldn’t want to take her out?

The one to whom Lavinia had been closest was Aunt Becky, and now that Aunt Becky had three children she would have been the logical person to ask about such things, but the truth was Lavinia couldn’t bring herself to do it. Besides, Aunt Becky was so old-fashioned, she probably didn’t know what she had done to have those babies. Lavinia, in fact, would rather not have known, when she came to college and discovered that there were girls who did know; not only knew, but had done it, and were willing to talk about it to their closest friends.

These girls claimed to like it, but Lavinia suspected most of them were lying. How could you like something that was so furtive, so forbidden, so dangerous? She couldn’t figure out why those girls had not become pregnant. When she had a class with one of the boys who had slept with a girl in her dorm, Lavinia could hardly look at him. He must be a skunk. If he had slept with that girl and wasn’t in love with her, then he must have slept with lots of other girls. Who would ever marry those girls now? Certainly not a skunk like him. A nice boy would never marry them if the word got around. Why, he wasn’t even handsome. And when one day after class he actually came up to her and tried to start a conversation, Lavinia just stuck her nose up in the air and walked away, leaving him staring after her. That was how she treated skunks, gave them what they deserved.

She did not date much. Some boys asked her to football games and dances, and sometimes she went, but she did not particularly like any of them. She went to the games and the dances because they were a part of college life. She had a slight crush on one of her professors, but she would never have dreamed of having anything to do with him because he was married. That was another thing Lavinia discovered at college that shocked her: some married professors sneaked out with girls. She could understand admiring a man, but what had happened to decency, to self-control? She was terrified of all these new things she was discovering. The old safe world she had grown up in was vanishing before her eyes. She had lived all her life with her family, with their friends, with the girls on the block and around the corner, whose parents were friends of her parents. Now she was in a community of strangers from all over the United States. If a boy whose life before this moment was a total mystery to you wanted to come up to you after class and ask for a date, he was allowed to do so. And you could accept, and find yourself alone at night with a strange man—yes, they were men now, not boys—and you had to rely on your wits and your natural decency to see that he treated you with respect. But some of these strangers were only after one thing. Papa would have had a fit if he had ever known, he would have dragged her right out of college. But Lavinia had a natural reserve, and there was something about her that seemed to frighten off the boys with the worst reputations. Perhaps it was her own good reputation.