Naked in the Promised Land (12 page)

"Little bitch," I heard him sneer a good distance behind me. But he wasn't following me. I hobbled frantically through the water and then over the sand, breathless, back to the blanket and my mother.

She sat there, still placid, innocent of thought. "
That's what a woman is for,
" Peggy Lee was singing on the radio. "Where's Jake?" my mother asked, smiling. "Did he show you how to swim?"

How could I answer her? I scrutinized the water, but he was nowhere in sight. Maybe he'd drowned.

This was the same strip of beach where I'd written
IRENE SANDMAN
over and over in the wet sand. I held the thought of her violet eyes now, like a holy relic.

Later Mr. Mann came lumbering, scowling and silent, across the sand. "How'd you get so many scratches? Your back's bleeding," my mother cried, touching his skin solicitously.

"I fell on those lousy rocks out there," he said, tossing his hand in the direction of our combat.

Whenever the phone rang during the next weeks I heard my heart thud in my ears, but it was always for Fanny. "I don't understand," my mother said. "I thought we got along so good." And then, maybe a month later, I saw her standing in front of the dresser mirror, her fingers lifting her cheeks. "I hear Marlene Dietrich had four facelifts," she said.

"You don't need a facelift. You're beautiful," I told her, meaning it, but she didn't seem to hear me.

"'Mary, you have such shining eyes, such
lichtege eigen,'
Moishe used to say to me," my mother sighed. "All gone now. Nothing left of it."

I kept my secret about why Jake Mann had disappeared because I thought it was better for her to be a little hurt and baffled than to learn the truth. But anxiety squeezed at my chest whenever I thought of him. "Let's forget the husband," I wanted to tell my mother. Yet how could we? Nothing had changed. Not a single problem had gone away.

"So one don't work out, what's to worry?" Mr. Cohen said with good cheer. He had many more names on his list, and for three more dollars there was always another.

Shmuel Glatt, a redheaded German Jew, was next. Shmuel had numbers tattooed on his forearm from the concentration camp where he'd lost his whole family. He was stocky and short, barely taller than my mother. His small brown eyes had heavy undershadows that gave him a permanent lugubrious look, but he smiled a lot and told jokes in
long strings, like Eddie Cantor or Jack Benny. His Yiddish accent was heavy, and it made his jokes, which were almost always about anti-Semites (
antizsemeeten,
he called them), funnier—or more disturbing.
So Rasputin says to Czar Nikolai, "Your Majesty, the Jews are complaining that you're anti-Semitic. For that, you should kill them all." "They're damn liars," the Czar says. "I'm not anti-Semitic, and I'll prove it. I'm only going to kill half of them." So a Jew is walking in the street, and he bumps into a Nazi. "Swine," says the Nazi. "Pleased to meet you. I'm Garfinkel," the Jew says. So Mr. Horowitz goes into this nice restaurant and sits down. And the goy waiter comes over to him and says, "We don't serve Jews here." "That's okay," Horowitz says. "Jews I don't eat. Give me a vegetable soup."

My mother didn't know how to react to Shmuel Glatt in the beginning, but later she laughed at his jokes, and I did too. She dressed in the New York clothes whenever he came, and she put on the Emir I'd bought her for Chanukah. In the months she went out with him, she had hardly any spells. I was a little sad that it wasn't I who had the power to make them go away,
but the important thing is, he's good for her,
I told myself.

"He's a gentleman," she said after their third or fourth date. I'd heard them on the porch. He asked her for "a kiss goodnight," and there was a brief silence. "I had a very nice time, Shmuel," she said less than a minute later, and then I heard her key in the door.

He'll do,
I thought. He even brought me Baby Ruth candy bars and Hershey with almonds, as though I were a kid, extracting them from a pocket on the inside of his jacket and presenting them to me with a magician's flourish. If my mother had to marry someone—and she did—Mr. Glatt wouldn't be a bad choice. He was all right.

It was his
lantsman
Falix Lieber, with whom he'd been liberated, barely alive, from the Bergen Belsen extermination camp, who became the bogeyman that lodged in my psyche and shook me for a long time.

"I got three free tickets for the Workmen's Circle bazaar," Shmuel Glatt announced one Saturday evening. "We'll have
pickelehs
there, we'll have
gribbines mit schmaltz
there, we'll have bellyaches there," he sang. It was there that my mother and I met Falix. "He helped me so much in the camp," Shmuel said, serious now, clapping Falix's back when he introduced him. Falix was in his thirties, with dusky skin and a soft black beard and hooded dark eyes set deep in his head. He wore a white shirt with half-rolled sleeves, his tattoo of numbers visible, like Shmuel's. Falix kept an arm around his seven-year-old daughter, Shayna, to whom he spoke in Yiddish. "
Maydeleh,
little girl," he called her. Later in the evening I watched as he fed her right out of his hand from the potato knish that he'd bought, lifting it to her pretty lips and then taking the tiniest nibble of the heavy dough himself, making her giggle immoderately.

"And you,
maydeleh?
" He turned to me after they'd finished the knish. "You want me to feed you too?"

I shook my head no, feeling foolish.

"And why not?" He winked at me. He followed us around the bazaar, never letting go of Shayna except to buy a dish of ice cream, which then he fed her and himself alternately, from the same spoon.

"So what do you do for a living?" he asked me.

Was he joking? Didn't he know I was a kid? "I'm in junior high school," I answered, discomfited by my own bashfulness. "In the ninth grade."

"Without Falix there wouldn't be a Shmuel Glatt here today," I heard Shmuel tell my mother again, tears in his small eyes. We all sat together and waited for the balalaika concert to begin. "I was ready to die. What did I need to keep living for? 'No,' Falix says. 'You have to show those bastards.' He made me eat when I didn't want to eat anything. He made me keep up my strength."

The next Sunday, when Shmuel banged on our screen door, Falix was right behind him. "On such a nice day I've come to drive everybody to the park," Falix announced. He wore a hat well back on his head, and the sleeves of his white shirt were rolled up again, exposing the terrible tattoo. "Madam." He extended his arm for me to take in imitation of Shmuel, who walked down the porch steps with my mother on his arm.

"Come on, Lilly. You come too," my mother said happily, still holding on to Shmuel's arm as she stood near Falix's old DeSoto.

"Madam?" Falix repeated more emphatically, his arm still extended at an exaggerated angle, and I took it, not knowing what else to do, and
let him lead me into the front seat of his car. My mother and Shmuel climbed into the back.

"We better walk faster," I told Falix in the park. He'd insisted we stroll arm-in-arm, like my mother and Shmuel, and I felt self-conscious and embarrassed. "They're way ahead of us."

"Yes, but who's got the car keys?" he answered with a wink. "When they need to go home, they'll come back and find us. Sit here." He led me to a bench under a tree.

"They'll be worried," I said, struggling awkwardly to free my arm from his grip as we sat on the bench. Maybe he saved Shmuel's life, but he was acting a little like Jake Mann, I thought. I was irritated with my mother for making me come with them and then abandoning me.

"Relax," he said, placing his arm around my shoulder. "Who's going to hurt you? Am I hurting you?" He lifted my chin and looked into my eyes. I tried to rise, but he pulled me back, planting his lips on mine, ignoring my push at his chest.

I wasn't strong enough to get him away from me. Where was my mother? When would someone come by? Finally he took his mouth from mine. "Don't you know how to kiss?" he whispered. "A big girl like you? What would it hurt if I showed you?" I struggled against him again, pushing at his shoulders, trying to clamp my mouth. It was useless. There was no more fight in me. I relaxed my hands, my lips. I let myself sink, like a drowned girl. My mother had disappeared. "Isn't this nice?" he raised his head to say, and returned to my lips.

But then his hand cupped my breast, and a shiver waved through me when his fingers moved over my nipple. "Don't," I said with clenched teeth, and my hand flew up to stop him.

"
Maydeleh,
what's the excitement?" he laughed and crooned. "What's so bad here?" He bent to my lips again, his breath warm on me, his hand on my breast again. My own hand covered his, but I didn't try to remove it.

He heard their voices at the same time I did, and he jumped up and settled two feet away from me on the bench. My mother and Shmuel were walking down the path toward us. I wanted to run to her, but what about Shmuel? I sat glued to the bench. Didn't she see what Falix had
been doing? Why didn't she yell at him like My Rae had yelled at Chuck?

"You had a nice tree to sit under," Shmuel said cordially.

"Yes," my mother said. "It's nice and shady here."

If there was a Mrs. Lieber I never saw her, and I never saw little Shayna after that first time at the bazaar. When Shmuel came to court my mother now, Falix was almost always with him. Didn't my mother understand what he was up to?

Falix talked to me as though I were an adult. He spared me nothing. "I have a good friend"—he was gleeful one Sunday—"who just married a beautiful lady with a beautiful daughter, fifteen." He stretched the vowels out as though he were tasting delectable little bites of knish—"bee-ooo-tii-ful," he said with feeling, and his eyes shone. "In the night he has the mother and in the day he has the daughter." His hand cupped my knee, moved to my thigh.

"When my Shayna is twelve years old," he said dreamily, a hint of melancholy in his voice, "I'll find her a
geliebte,
a lover. A girl shouldn't go longer than twelve without a man to love her."

He crooned at me always, whether I was fighting him off or tired of fighting him off. He sought me in the kitchen, on Fanny's crumbling back porch, in the bedroom as I sat on the floor doing my homework. Sometimes I let him touch me where he wanted, pretending more struggle than I felt. Then I hated myself for it.

But when I lay in bed, my mother asleep in the bed next to mine, and I remembered where and how he touched me, I was also overwhelmed by physical sensations in deep places where I'd never had them before. They weren't like the sweet throbbings I'd had at night when I thought of Irene. They came in great scary waves and were out of my control. When I thought about Falix Lieber in the daylight my face flamed. Could people tell about that dark thing by looking at me?

It went on for a couple of months, and then Falix disappeared, along with Shmuel, just as Jake Mann had. I was relieved never to have to see Falix again and Shmuel, who brought him and must surely have guessed what was going on. But even years later, Falix Lieber sometimes sneaked
up on me to scare me, to lull me, in fantasies that popped out of nowhere, crooning, "
Maydeleh,
what's so bad here?"

I think my mother was really upset to be dropped by Shmuel. I know she'd felt a special link to him—they'd both suffered because of the Nazis, they'd both had terrible losses, and now they might help each other forget a little bit and snatch some happiness from life. But not even that had worked out. "I can't no more," my mother cried. "They don't like me. I'm old. Who would want me now anyway?" She flopped on her bed and threw her eyes heavenward once again, and I stood at the door feeling more helpless than ever. I had no idea what we could do next.

But Yehuda Cohen had another one: Albert Gordin, "a nice, honest man," the matchmaker said, collecting our three dollars and folding them into his moth-eaten wallet. "Has a steady job. A bachelor." Mr. Cohen enumerated the new man's virtues.

Albert arrived on a Sunday afternoon with a little bouquet of pink carnations wrapped in newspaper. He was seven or eight years younger than my mother. (She'd lied about her age to Mr. Cohen, and never—in twenty-five years—did Albert learn the truth.) He wore a new-looking plaid jacket that was too big across the shoulders and too long in the sleeves and a yellow-and-blue-striped tie that also looked new. He removed his hat from time to time—only to wipe his brow in the L.A. heat. When he lifted it, I could see two deep indentations on the top of his head, which was bald as a baby's.

He didn't offer to take my mother out anywhere. He got to the point, sitting on Fanny's couch. "I'm looking to get married. Mr. Cohen says you're looking for the same thing."

"Yes, I wouldn't mind getting married," my mother said. Her voice sounded to me as shaky as a little old lady's.

"Mr. Cohen told me you're a good, honest person," he said.

"Yes," my mother said guilelessly.

"I make a good living. Not too much, but enough for a wife."

"I wouldn't have to work?" my mother asked, getting to the point herself. She'd had too many painful months to be coy now.

"Not you and not your daughter."

"So I could stop my job right away if we got married?"

I held my breath.

"I'll tell you," he said. "My mother says to me a couple months ago, 'Albert, I'm going, and now you have to settle down with a nice lady.' And then she passes away. She was almost eighty-four years." He swiped at a tear in the corner of his eye, but I don't think my mother saw it because she was studying the floor as though the faded flowers of Fanny's carpet were tea leaves that could foretell her future. "So if we like each other, we'll get married right away and you don't have to work no more, okay?" Albert asked.

The next day he came in the evening, right after my mother got home from work. He wasn't going to waste any time. On this visit he was more relaxed and a lot more voluble. Whenever he was about to launch into a monologue he abruptly stood up. "Those doctors I work with at Cedars of Lebanon Hospital, they're so smart," he proclaimed, "they know everything—
everything.
You can ask them a question, any question you want, and they can tell you the answer. That's how they got where they are." He plopped down again on Fanny's couch.