Keeping Secrets (5 page)

Until Helen. At first he hadn’t seen her in the dark hallway of his rooming house on upper Broadway and had bumped into her coming out of the room next door.

“Sorry,” he’d muttered and then flushed. He was always bumbling, he thought, always putting his foot in it.

“Oh no,” she’d said in a soft Southern drawl that prolonged and multiplied every word until it sounded like three. “It’s my fault. I should have looked where I was going.”

And then he looked at her. She was tall for a woman, an armful, with soft brown hair and a pretty smile.

He’d thought about her for days after, listening in hopes of hearing her through the wall. He found himself racing home from work in the evenings, taking a quick shower in the bathroom down the hall and dressing in his best pleated pants, a fresh shirt. Then he sat and listened. When he heard her radio go off, he grabbed his coat and ran out the door. They almost collided once again.

She’d smiled. “Well, isn’t this a coincidence? Neighbors back home run into each other all the time, but here in New York it seems like everyone’s just strangers. Doesn’t it?”

Jake nodded and ducked his head. He wanted to talk to her. Oh, how he wanted to talk with her. But what to say? And how to make his tongue do his bidding?

Goddamn you, stutter, behave! he shouted inside his head.

“Yes, b-b-b-bu…” He couldn’t get it out. Goddammit, he couldn’t. He wheeled away.

“But what?” she asked softly. Was she laughing at him? “But you aren’t a stranger, are you, even though I don’t know your name.”

“Jake,” he’d managed. Quick, he’d outtricked his tongue. “Jake Fine.”

“Helen Kaplan.” She’d stuck out her hand. Jake couldn’t believe it—a Jew with a Southern accent. “I’m on my way to get some Chinese food for supper. Would you like to join me?”

Over chow mein she told him she’d been in New York a year. She was from Georgia, from a small town. She was working as a clerk and seeing doctors at Mount Zion. Something about her heart. Two weeks later they had married at City Hall. Helen was lovely in a pale-blue gabardine dress. Jake’s vanilla-colored suit looked like ice cream. The next day they moved to Baltimore. The jobs were better there, Helen had said, shipbuilding for the war. It was early spring 1943.

“Will you have to go into the service again?” Helen asked Jake while sweeping the steps of their little row house, its redbrick face like that of a hundred thousand others.

“I served my time. And until they call me again, I’m not volunteering.” They didn’t call, and Jake went to the shipyard every day and stayed home evenings with Helen, listening to the radio. They had just settled in, new curtains just hung, when she told him about the baby. At first he thought she was joking.

But she wasn’t joking when she extracted the promise from Jake. “If anything happens, you never give our baby up. Do you hear?”

“Don’t be silly,” he’d answered, when he’d gotten used to the idea, patting her stomach beneath a brown-and-white polka-dotted dress. “Nothing’s going to happen.” He’d reached across their kitchen table and touched her light-brown hair. “You’ll see.”

But he’d promised.

Had she known then that they would never cuddle a child together, watch her grow into a long-legged little girl? Had she always known that her heart wasn’t up to it?

“Don’t make me laugh so hard.” (Or love so hard, she’d whisper.)

“Jake, if you tickle me anymore, I swear I’m going to have an attack.”

“Honey, would you carry this sack for me? I can’t walk up these stairs as fast as you.”

Then she’d grown pale, and a little clammy, but what did he know? What did a Yankee Russian Jew know about a Southern lady and her games? All he knew was that he loved her. Nothing else mattered.

And for a brief time, all was golden. They named the beautiful blue-eyed baby Emma after Helen’s mother. Then came that afternoon just nineteen days after Emma was born, when Jake came home from work to a house that was too still.

He had raced the last few blocks from the trolley down Independence Avenue, hurried so that the roses wouldn’t wilt and the milk wouldn’t grow warm. He’d made it. The milk was still cold when he walked in the door, the cream separated, rich and thick in the bottle’s neck.

“Helen,” Jake had called.

He waited for her answer from the bedroom, but none came.

Then there was a whimper which swelled into a wail. He dropped the roses and the milk on the table and stepped to the bedroom door.

“Helen?”

Emma was in her crib, her little pink mouth wide with rage.

Helen was lying face down on the floor on the far side of the bed. She was marble pale, marble cold and very still.

“Probably heart failure,” said the white-coated doctor summoned by the frantic call on a neighbor’s phone.

It didn’t matter what the doctor thought was probable, what he guessed. No matter what he called it, Helen was dead.

Just the day before they had eaten half a cake decorated with little pink roses, thirty-seven candles, and “Happy Birthday, Jake” spelled out in blue icing.

Jake sat in their quiet kitchen, with the cake on the cabinet growing stale, for what might have been hours, could have been days. Emma never left his arms. She was all he had left.

Then as if waking from a dream he asked himself, What next?

His mother, Riva, had been gone for several years. His older sister, Rhoda Goldberg, rambled through her big house carrying pictures of her son Marty, the bravest little boy in New Jersey, as if she could find him again if only she opened the right door. Her husband, Herb, said she looked through their other two children as if they were ghosts, as if they too had been snatched away by rheumatic fever.

His brothers had families, problems, of their own.

“Ruth,” he cried into the phone, “Helen’s gone.”

The next day his redhaired baby sister was at his side, Ruth who had slapped the faces of boys who teased him about his stutter, the one who could always make him laugh, dancing a jig, striking a pose.

“Oh, Jake.” She stroked the top of his balding head. “Poor Jake, I’ll take her home to raise with my little Ed.”

“No!” The word had burst out. But then he wrapped Emma in the blanket embroidered with pink and blue cat faces that Helen had stitched with her slender hands. He had to move back to New York and let Ruth keep Emma. This wasn’t breaking his promise to Helen. This wasn’t letting Emma go.

He took the train Saturdays at noon after his job at a Manhattan cleaner’s. It was only an hour to Connecticut, where Ruth lived while her husband George built destroyers in New London.

Ruth met him at the door with Emma, handing the bundled baby to him before she even kissed him hello. Then they sat in her front room, their feet resting on an Oriental carpet, and sipped hot tea through lumps of sugar held in their mouths as Riva had taught them. Ruth served a pot roast, purchased with the coupons Jake had saved, and her famous pilaff with noodles, tomatoes and green beans.

“She’s a precious baby, Jake. Helen would have been so proud. I just wish I’d known her.”

Jake’s eyes filled with tears and he nodded.

No one had known Helen except him.

“Why didn’t you ever bring her around, Jake? Just that once, to Rhoda’s house, that one afternoon.”

Jake stared into his hands. He couldn’t explain to Ruth that he’d always felt himself a failure, that his father favored the other brothers, the ones who never stopped talking, talking, talking with glib tongues that made deals, made money, made friends, while he sat silent on the sofa and watched his life drift by. Finally, when he had found Helen, the things he felt were too complicated to even begin to explain.

Perhaps he had feared that they would disapprove. And if his father had said a single harsh word, he would have…well, he wouldn’t have been responsible.

Or was he afraid his brothers would tease him, marrying so quickly and so late, as if to seize romance, under any circumstances, before it got away?

He only knew that it felt safer just keeping to themselves. Helen hadn’t asked any questions about his family. And he didn’t ask any about hers. They had each other. The past didn’t matter. What they had was enough.

“I don’t know, Ruth,” he finally answered.

“Well, that’s okay. We’ll just raise her as a Fine. Nothing wrong with that.” Jake agreed, nothing wrong at all.

But it wasn’t long after that—Emma was just beginning to creep across Ruth’s red-and-blue Oriental carpet—when a middle-of-the-night desperate call had come the other way, from Ruth’s house to his.

God, if anything’s happened to my baby I’ll curse your name and die, Jake thought as he squeezed the receiver in his hand.

“It’s George,” Ruth cried on the other end of the line. “He’s been burned—in an accident in New London. They don’t expect him to live the night.”

George did live, with Ruth at his side changing his dressings, slipping ice through his parched lips.

And Jake stood, once again, alone with the infant Emma in his arms.

Then his old friend and brother-in-law Herb called. “My sister Shirley is living out in Brooklyn, in Flatbush. Her husband is overseas. She’ll take care of Emma.”

“But I can’t…”

“Can’t what, Jake?”

Shirley’s family, Helen. I’m not letting her go.

* * *

“There are lots of women in this neighborhood giving you the eye, Jake,” Shirley said. They were walking to the candy store for an egg cream on a steamy Brooklyn afternoon.

“Don’t be silly.”

Emma, dressed only in a diaper against the August heat, gurgled in his arms.

“You listen to me, Jake. It’s been eight months now. You know I love Emma and if you’d let me I’d keep her forever.”

Yes, he did know that, and it was beginning to worry him. Shirley was growing too attached.

“But there are plenty of widows here, nice women whose husbands aren’t coming home from the war, and you ought to start thinking about settling down with one.”

How was he going to do that? He worked five and a half days a week stocking and sweeping a grocery store nearby. He picked up Emma Saturday noon and kept her all day Sunday. He couldn’t court someone with his baby in his arms.

“Well, if you don’t want to remarry, there are lots of women who would love to have this precious little girl. Why, just the other day Mrs. Rosenberg asked me—she and her husband can’t have any—”

“No!”

“Shhhh! You’re shouting. Here, I’ll hold her while you go in and get the egg creams. Watch out for those little boys. They’ll mow you down.”

They walked with their sodas toward Prospect Park, where it was cooler. “But you know what I’m saying, Jake. You need to find a wife.”

He knew Shirley was right. And that had been part of the promise to Helen, too, hadn’t it? Never give her away. But find her a mother.

Helen, it took me thirty-six years to find you, he said to her before he went to sleep that night. How am I ever going to find another?

“Well,” said Herb, spreading the paper out in front of him. “I don’t think it’s a bad idea at all.”

Jake shook his head.

“Wait, Jake, before you say no. Mrs. Rodolitz in our neighborhood found a new husband this way, and she’s not half as good-looking as you. You both have the same nose, and I guess she’s got more hair than you.”

Jake laughed. Herb had always been able to make him laugh.

“Look at all these ads—women who are looking for husbands. You just pick one, or more, hell, play the field, write them letters, and see what you get. Or, if you want to, you place a listing, and they’ll write you. It’s all by mail, Jake. And it doesn’t cost much.”

“I’ll see. I’ll see.” Who knew, Jake thought, what such a thing might cost?

* * *

“Cypress,” the bus driver called again, and Jake started. The bus pulled into the terminal and the door opened. His journey was over.

Jake let all the other passengers go by before he rose stiffly from his seat, bundled up the sleeping Emma, his coat and hat, and gingerly picked his way down the aisle, then down the bus’s steps. He didn’t want to fall on his face before the waiting Rosalie, his mail-order bride.

3

Nothing moves very fast in West Cypress. And nothing ever changes—not even the inferiority complex the town, situated across the Coupitaw River from its richer and larger twin city, Cypress, has suffered from its very beginnings.

In 1792, when Cypress was a fort established by the French and continued by the Spanish, a pair of wild and boisterous soldiering brothers, the Laplante boys, were told by the Fort Cypress commandant that he’d just as soon they moved out of the compound and made other arrangements.

In a huff, the Laplantes took the few shreds of blankets they owned and their horses and forded the river to the uninhabited side. Within a few hot months—for their resettlement occurred in the trough of a Louisiana mosquito-plagued summer—they had built six huts along a dirt path and had established themselves as entrepreneurs of a particular kind, filling the lean-tos with liquor and women and gambling, the likes of which had not been seen before within the boundaries of what was to be the Louisiana Purchase.

Now, about one hundred and fifty years after the Laplante boys had been run off by the proper citizens of Cypress, the only emporium for sin in West Cypress was the Ritz Bar located on one end of the town’s main street, which was still no more than two blocks long. And that sinning was mild, in the form of dominoes and beer, for this was the intense Bible Belt, where sugared iced tea, white bread, and churchgoing were the accepted standards of consumption and entertainment.