Keeping Secrets (4 page)

Emma kept waiting for the bottom of her stomach to drop, for a cold hand to clutch it and make her tremble. Instead, she was grinning into the wind. She felt like Elmer with his head hanging out the car window, ears flying.

She fiddled with the radio, finding more and more honest-to-God country-and-western stations as she drove into the Big Valley.

Why didn’t she feel scared, sad, broken-hearted like the good old boys singing on the radio? All she seemed to feel was relief.

Maybe it was because this wasn’t really running away from home—if she was also running
to
home on the other end. Except Louisiana hadn’t been home for many years, and she really didn’t know why she was going there. To see Rosalie and Jake? That was a joke.

Maybe she’d told Jesse she was going home to make him mad, because she knew he hated the South.

Let’s think about this a minute, Emma. No need to cut off your nose to spite your face. You don’t
have
to go to Louisiana just because you told Jesse you were going to. That’s even more reason
not
to. Why don’t you go back, pack your stuff, and leave early for Italy?

It was too complicated, the travel arrangements, they wouldn’t be expecting her.

Emma kept driving south.

* * *

There was Bakersfield, quick, she missed it. Then she hung a left and headed east across the Mojave Desert as the sun set behind her back. She stopped with a toe still in California, pulled up in front of a motel in Needles. Just across the dotted blue line on the map was Nevada.

Dinner was a hamburger. Not bad. Maybe she’d eat nothing but hamburgers all the way. “The Definitive Emma Rochelle Fine Tree Survey of the American Hamburger.” Back in her room, she took a long hot shower, pulled back the swirly orange-and-brown bedspread and collapsed.

She stretched and rooted. For the first time in four years she was truly alone again. She could read in bed all night long if she wanted to. She could call room service, if there were room service. She could eat nothing but Mallomars, drink a fifth of Southern Comfort,
bathe
in it if she wanted. She could do anything she was big enough to, when she got around to it.

For now, she reached into her zippered bag and pulled out the new paperback she’d been waiting to have a chance to read.

She held the book up and stared at its cover.
Even Cowgirls Get the Blues.
Well, she’d just see about that.

But Emma and the cowgirls didn’t ride very far together. Four pages down the road, she began to fade. It had been a hell of a forty-eight hours.

She switched out the light, snuggled down and began to drift, when a thought lit her mind like Las Vegas neon.

Goddamn Jesse to hell! Why did he have to remind her, with his soft sweet insidious seduction, that lovely fucking, before he’d gone insane and pounded into her as if she were a piece of liver, that he remembered exactly what would sweet-feel her into boneless, mindless lust?

Come, now, Emma, she asked herself, did you really think that he’d forgotten?

Then why didn’t he ever do it? she argued with herself. Why had it been so long that she’d forgotten that he knew?

Because he’s an ornery, manipulative six-plus son-of-a-bitch, that’s why.

That settled, she closed her eyes and relaxed—for a moment.

Is that what you’re going to tell them when you get to West Cypress? Are you going to tell on Jesse? Tell them that he’d been fucking around instead of sweet-fucking you until you decided to do the same?

Of course not.

There would be cold comfort indeed in spilling out all her troubles to Rosalie and Jake. She wasn’t quite sure why she was headed south, but it sure as hell wasn’t for that.

They weren’t that kind of Southern parents. And she wasn’t that kind of Southern girl.

Southern girl…she was drifting again. Words played hide-and-seek on a drive-in movie screen in her mind.

Hell, what was a Southern girl? After all those years away, was she one anymore?

Jesse had always teased her—
You can take the girl out of the South, but you can’t
… And what was it about Southern girls? She remembered a childhood singsong.

Nice Southern girls don’t drink or smoke or go with boys who do.

Southern girls don’t say shit even if they have a mouth full of it.

Southern girls
definitely
don’t screw.

And Southern girls don’t go out in the sun.

Emma drifted further and further, then her body jolted. She balanced on the knife edge of sleep.

Don’t go out in the sun ’cause it’s bad for your complexion, makes your skin all dark and wrinkly like a prune. Then who will want to marry you? And if you’re not married, honey, where are you? You’re alone in the world, with nobody to love or take care of you.

The way she was right now.

At least, that’s what most folks would say.

Except Rosalie.

She wouldn’t say that at all.

She’d say, had always said since Emma was a little girl, “Emma, don’t you ever depend on a man. Most of them are no good, even if they look it at first. Girl, you better learn to take care of yourself.”

Emma
had
taken care of herself. She always had. Even when she didn’t want to.

And years later, when she was grown up, long after all the others in West Cypress had written her off as an old maid, Rosalie Fine had never asked that terribly rude question that others posed: “Why’s a good-looking girl like you not married?”

Though when Emma finally did meet and marry Jesse Tree, she hadn’t bothered to tell her parents.

As she’d said to Jesse and herself, there were lots of things Jake and Rosalie hadn’t told
her
.

Keeping secrets ran in the family.

2

West Cypress, Louisiana

1944

It was late in the evening of Jake Fine’s third night on the road when the bus driver announced, “Next stop, Cypress, Louisiana.”

Jake stretched and yawned, as much to relieve his nervousness as his fatigue. What was he doing here?

Then the baby in the seat beside him whimpered. He looked down at her and remembered. Emma, she was the reason he was three days and nights and fifteen hundred miles from New York City, Emma and the promise he’d made to Helen.

“If anything happens,” she had said, somber-faced, four months pregnant, “promise me you’ll never give up the baby, Jake. Find it another mother, but don’t ever let it go.”

So Jake was on this bus, changing diapers, changing his life as the miles rolled on, setting out on his second giant migration. And though the distance of the first, from Minsk to New York City, was greater than that from New York to West Cypress, he had a feeling that the changes were going to be just as momentous.

Jake leaned his bald head back against the prickly brown cushion once more. His hazel eyes closed. He didn’t want to think about what might lie ahead for him. It was too terrifying. The past was safer. The memories of his first trip were like sepia photos, crackled and faded, but nonetheless preserved.

* * *

He could see himself as a tiny boy in short pants holding on to his mother, Riva’s, hand. They were in a tremendous open hall jammed with thousands of people all jabbering in languages he couldn’t understand.

A fat woman on the bench next to them whispered rumors into his mother’s ear.

“They won’t admit you if you have more than four children…. They send you back if you have lice…. You have to have a job…a relative who can vouch for you.”

Then, finally, up the long stairs they marched, his father, Isidore, straight-backed and stern, his mother Riva, with Rhoda, Moe and Jake holding hands between them.

“Hurry,” Isidore urged them. “Take the stairs in big steps and don’t stumble. It’s a test, to see if you’re strong enough to make it.”

They’d streaked up the steps and soon were on the ferry headed toward buildings taller than he’d ever imagined, even in his dreams.

As the breezes blew his hair, Jake looked up at his stern-faced father with pride. Isidore was a
macher
, a
mensch
. He knew his way around. Two years earlier, he’d made the journey alone. Now in this place called Battery Park he waved away the flailing arms of men shouting their offers: “Rooms…” “Over here, jobs…” “Work papers, I’ll get you work papers…” “Trains, where do you want to go?”

Isidore knew where he was going. The first time, a greenhorn, he had almost ended up on a train for Houston, Texas, rather than on a trolley for Houston Street and the Lower East Side. But he had found his way, had worked in a kitchen, behind a pushcart, in a boiler room, to earn the dollars with which to bring over his family.

This time, with them firmly in tow, he stayed on the trolley until it reached Grand Central Station. He had moved up and out of the city already. There was an apartment waiting for them, six rooms at a respectable address in New Haven, Connecticut. There the family would live and three more children, Joseph, Ruth and Sidney, would be born.

Jake smiled as he thought of that first apartment’s kitchen, the kosher meals his short, round mother prepared, the kasha, the borscht, the chickens yellow with fat. What kind of food was there going to be in West Cypress?

Outside the bus windows, the lights of Cypress were beginning to flare through the flat blackness like Friday-night candles. Jake could see himself in the mirror of remembrance in a yarmulke, serious-faced among the children as they watched Riva light the Sabbath candles. Were there synagogues in the South? Were there even any Jews?

The city lights grew brighter, and his pulse quickened. It wouldn’t be long now. He thought about friends he’d left behind: the Goldbergs, who had lived next door in New Haven. They’d come over a couple of years earlier, and their kids were already as proud and as street-smart as the natives. They taught the Fines more English than the Cedar Street School. And they taught them stickball, how to order in the candy store, how to fit in.

It was their father, Nathan Goldberg, who taught Isidore the fine arts of distilling and bottling. The smell of their homemade hooch, rich and ripe and yeasty, filled the whole neighborhood until Riva put her foot down.

“What are we going to do, Isidore, when they lock you in prison and send you back to the other side for this little bit of extra money? Are you going to be happy then, when the children and I starve to death?”

Where was Jake going to find another friend like Herb Goldberg, who had stood under the wedding tent with his sister Rhoda? Rhoda and Herb—they had been the first, when the family had started to grow smaller, yet larger; Rhoda, then Ruth, then Moe, and on down the line, the children had married and left. Except for Jake. Jake had stayed at home.

“You’ll find someone, Jakey,” his mother hugged him and said. “The right girl will come along.”

But Jake knew that she wouldn’t.

He was the one who had dropped out of the Cedar Street School the earliest, after the sixth grade when he couldn’t take the taunting anymore: “J-J-J-Jake, wh-wh-what’s the matter, cat got your tongue?”

He could rattle on in Yiddish just as well as the next one, but when he had tried to wrap his tongue around this new language it twisted and turned.

At home he told tales about the weekend trip to Coney Island, the rides, the roller coaster, the beach, the daring with which he had jumped into the mammoth waves—
that
big. He bragged in the kitchen to his mother and his favorite redheaded sister Ruth until they threatened to toss him out.

But his father insisted. “He’s got to speak English, Riva, if he wants to get ahead.” So his mother tried her best to practice the little English she had with Jake, but late at night, after Isidore had gone to bed, it was in Yiddish that they whispered.

Those nights couldn’t last forever, though, and as Jake grew and the family shrank, he became more silent. As long as he said nothing, no one could laugh. He sought out jobs in the back of a grocery store, in a cannery, a cleaner’s, jobs that he could hold with no education, jobs where he could keep his mouth shut.

Long days of work ran one into the other until one of the Goldberg boys said, “Come on, Jake, let’s go see the world.” Why not? That’s what the Navy promised. And for three years he was a real man, a sailor in San Diego. He went home with tattoos blue as the Pacific on both his forearms. The heart, the flowers, the cowgirl, Mom—they were on special, he told his mother proudly, a bargain twenty-five cents apiece. Back home in New Haven, Isidore frowned: Jews don’t have tattoos.

Isidore had frowned at him more and more after his return, so he hadn’t settled back into the family house but moved into Manhattan. There eight, ten, twelve years had slipped by, the days all the same at one job or another, the evenings brightened by picture shows and vaudeville.

Al Jolson, Burns and Allen, and Jack Benny were on stages just minutes away on Broadway. The movies were a quarter, and dime novels, especially his favorite detectives, filled the stands. These were enough for Jake. So the twenties, the thirties, his twenties and thirties, passed; except for the visits to his family’s homes, he lived his life quietly and alone.