Old Neighborhood (5 page)

“Just like that—you’re giving this to me?”

“I thought it would look nice on your wall.”

“I’m overwhelmed.”

“You’re just lucky.”

“Yes, I am. I’m very lucky.”

I think I was able to bring something to her life as well, some vitality. I was not as manic as Liebowitz, but I was more alive than Beverly’s previous boyfriend. His name was Jeremy, a tall, blond art instructor at UCLA, whom I met at an art department tea. He was holding forth on his views of art and artists, several coeds doting on him.

“Jackson Pollock is vastly overrated as far as I’m concerned,” he was saying in a tired voice. “Whistler is another one. Some say he was underrated. I can’t see him at all.”

“His mother didn’t think so,” I said.

“Are you interested in art?” he asked me patronizingly.

“The art
industry
interests me at the moment. People who make a career out of talking about it.”

“You don’t seem very happy at this party.”

“It’s lively enough. If you were brought up in Death Valley.”

Beverly walked over and took me away from the group. “Steve, relax. I’m with you, not with him.”

For six months Beverly and I spent at least two nights together during the week and every available hour on the weekends. On Saturday mornings we were apart, Beverly rode horses, which I regarded as some California thing, then after that we were together until Monday mornings.

One night before we went to sleep, I said to her:

“I love you.”

“I love you? That’s what you say? A bigtime copywriter and that’s all you can come up with?”

“I can’t think of anything else to say. I love you, Bevvy.”

“Steve, I love you too.”

“Do you?”

“Very much.”

“Do you think you could see your way clear to marry me?”

“I think I could.”

“God! Who would have believed I could find someone beautiful, smart, blond and Jewish?”

“Well, California Jewish.”

“Even so—you don’t know how much easier you’ve made it for my mother.”

I watched her until she fell asleep, incredulous that this person was in my life. I had never been so happy.

We went to Sacramento so I could meet Beverly’s parents, whom she had been reticent to discuss, she said only that they were “in real estate” and “somewhat interesting.” She did not mention that George and Cindy Hillman lived on a ranch outside Sacramento and had horses in the back in a corral, which was a new level in pets for me.

“You got to have
marzel,
boy,” George said. “Know what I mean by
marzel?
”

“I believe so.”

“Had an old grandmother, and she used to say, ‘You need
marzel.
’ And she was tough. Tough as horsehide.”

George Hillman was in his late forties, five feet ten, lean, suntanned, dressed Western style with a string tie and a horse’s head on anything that had a surface, his shirts, belt buckle, boots. Cindy Hillman was a sturdy little blonde in buckskin who looked like a retired rodeo queen. I was marrying into a family that featured Roy Rogers and Dale Evans. George had chosen to color his Western drawl with Jewish words he could not get straight, as though he learned them from Berlitz. He placed “r”s incorrectly in the middle of words, he missed the “ch” sound, making it “k.”

“We got
kutzper.
Biggest brokers this part of the country. You got
kutzper,
boy?”

“Sure do. I’m tough as horsehide, Mr. Hillman.”

Phones rang constantly in the house, the Hillmans conducted business during meals, in the middle of conversations. The mood in their home was that of an auction. Beverly’s older brother, Freddy, attempted to compete but he did not have the
kutzper
of his father. A moonfaced blond in his twenties, he was slightly shorter and heavier than George. As associate in the family real estate business, he did a considerable amount of smiling.

“You have to be a real
shmurck
not to turn over dollars these days,” George told me over dinner.

“We’re not greedy, though,” Cindy said. “We take time out for the good things in life.”

“Your horses,” he said.

“And your horticulture,” she added.

George filled a glass for me.

“
L’Tchayem,
” he said.

After dinner we walked back to look at the horses.

“Beauties, wouldn’t you say?”

“I don’t know much about horses, Mr. Hillman. Yours look very large and clean.”

“Very large and clean?” Beverly whispered to me away from the others.

“What was I to say? Horses! I thought you just rode them. I didn’t know your family actually
owned
horses. What else don’t I know about you?”

“You don’t know how much I love you.”

The showdown took place over cognac later that night in the den, a room that was liberally decorated with the remnants of cattle. George Hillman began to discuss New York City, which he had visited once and hated, it was dirty, the people were rude, and I had begun to be referred to as “This New Yorker here.”

“Why don’t we talk about Beverly and me?”

“Is there something to talk about, boy?”

“We’d like to be married,” I said.

“We’ve been going together for six months,” Beverly said. “And we love each other.”

“Now, darling, we hardly know this New Yorker here,” George responded.

“Mr. Hillman, I am a college graduate, a senior copywriter at an advertising agency, I earn one hundred fifty dollars a week, and I love your daughter.”

“Everybody loves Beverly,” Cindy Hillman said. “That’s not significant.”

“We were thinking about a fall wedding, Mrs. Hillman.”

“A fall wedding!” George shouted. “That’s too soon. What am I, a horse’s
tukus?
”

“George! What Mr. H. means is we have the Jewish holidays in the fall.”

“Oh,” I said. “Do you have them flown in?”

A wise guy’s remark. I was just too much of a wise guy in those days. I was supposed to generate fast talk in my work and get it on paper and I sometimes did not know when to stop. George Hillman was livid.

“The discussion is over! Nobody has my permission to get married!”

I had mismanaged my meeting with Beverly’s parents and I was worried, not knowing how much influence they had over her.

“My darlings,” she said to them, “we’re of age and we’re going to get married.”

“Why don’t you take some time? Get to know each other better,” Cindy said.

“We are getting married.”

“I’d like to think about this,” George said.

“There is nothing to think about.”

“You’re not even asking us?”

“No. This is an announcement, Father.”

If I did not already love her, I would have loved her. They knew something about Beverly that I did not, how resolute she could be—and they capitulated.

“Well, let’s not make a whole
magayla
out of it,” George responded.

“Thank you,” I said, and I shook his hand. “Here’s to you,” Freddy said, smiling and raising his glass. “
Marzel tov.
”

We were married in 1958, I was twenty-four, Beverly was twenty-one. To help the cause of family unity, I asked Beverly’s brother to be my best man. Beverly’s college roommate was her maid of honor, I invited several people from the office, including Liebowitz, who told me at the wedding that Cindy Hillman was “the world’s best mother-in-law piece of tail in the world” that he had ever seen. I sent invitations to my friends in New York but I knew there was too much time and distance between us now, and they did not attend. My parents seemed dazed throughout their stay in California, as though they were in shock from all the experiences they had to absorb, that I was getting married, that this place was now my home, that their only child no longer needed them in any discernible way. The weather was scorching, they were inappropriately dressed in wool for the trip, adding to their distress. I pleaded with them to let me buy them lighter clothes—I knew they had tried to wear their very best outfits, which happened to be wool, but they refused my offer. My father’s posture was more stooped than ever before. My mother looked pale and tired. I suspected that I had disappointed her. I had the Good Job, but I had not become a doctor or a lawyer or even a CPA. My achievements were based upon glibness.

“Do you like this advertising work?”

“Yes. I’m good at it.”

“They pay you well, so you must be good at it.”

She touched my face, searching for a child she remembered.

“The newspapers here—they’re deficient,” she said. “I checked.”

“They try.”

“Can’t you get
The New York Times?
”

“You tend to read the newspaper for the city you live in, Mother.”

She was not satisfied.

“And everybody rides here. Your legs will atrophy. Your brain, too.”

“I think I can get the Sunday
Times.
”

“You promise?”

“Yes, Mother, I promise.”

When I consented to George and Cindy’s request that the ceremony and reception be held in their home I did not realize this would be the social event of the fall season in Sacramento—a lawn party, tent, society orchestra with violins, beef on an outdoor barbecue and heavy drinking. Beverly’s parents invited over three hundred guests, most of them evidently business acquaintances. When Beverly was busy with her cousins, I broke away from the crowd, walked to the back and leaned against the fence which corralled the horses, observing the proceedings, the open sky, the suntanned faces, the leather, the bourbon. I had the distinct sense of being at someone else’s wedding. Beverly slipped away from the others and found me there and we leaned against the fence with our arms around each other.

“It’s so extravagant,” I said.

“Don’t worry. My parents will write it off.”

“My parents barely talk to each other. We’ll always talk to each other, won’t we?”

“Always.”

“Do you think your parents have had trouble?”

“I don’t think it’s within their business interest to do so.”

One of the horses began to graze near us.

“Unbelievable. I never thought I’d have a horse at my wedding.”

“Let’s leave.”

I turned to look at her, and brushed her hair away from her face, Beverly at twenty-one, in her white dress, carrying flowers.

“Bevvy, you’re so pretty I could cry.”

I asked the rabbi to read from Ecclesiastes. Little else made sense to me, and Ecclesiastes in a literary rather than a religious sense. My mother had arisen one night, walked into the bathroom, had a stroke and died at fifty-one. The rabbi was connected with the funeral chapel, my parents did not have their own rabbi, and he performed the $25 special, drawing on bits of information my father and I provided, fulfilling his obligation to himself by informing the small group before him that he had not known the deceased personally.

My parents were without living relatives, just a handful of friends were present for the dreary event. Beverly and I, my father and the Fishers from the candy store drove in one limousine to a cemetery in Queens. After a perfunctory ceremony, my mother was lowered into the grave.

“Goodbye, Mother,” I said aloud. “I’m sorry.”

I had been all right to that point, handling arrangements with the funeral parlor, being businesslike. As I turned away from the grave site, it all fell apart for me. I began to tremble and Beverly took me in her arms. I was weeping, saying over and over, “She never even saw me play ball … she never even saw me play ball. …”

I had left in a closet, and my parents had not discarded, my old possessions: my first basketball—a leather ball taped at the seams with adhesive tape—my varsity jacket, childhood books, my collection of Dixie Cup covers from World War II, a picture of George “Snuffy” Stirnweiss of the New York Yankees. I wanted these things with me and I bought a trunk which I filled with the items and arranged to have it shipped to California.

I gave Beverly a tour of the neighborhood, she found it “dark and confining,” and after my time on the West Coast, I agreed with her. I was concerned about my father, he had been remote throughout the proceedings, but he announced his best therapy would be to return to work. He planned to take a few days off, then go back to the store. He did not seem in need of us, neither I nor Beverly were in the mood for sightseeing in New York, and we booked our return flight to California. The one expression of emotion from my father over my mother’s death occurred when we said goodbye at the door of the apartment. My father turned to me and said:

“It wasn’t always bad between us. It was good in the beginning.”

Beverly became pregnant later that year. This was not planned, but we decided we could afford a baby, I had been receiving steady raises thanks to my progress in the job and to Colby’s eccentricity. When Beverly was in her eighth month, my father called to tell me he was going to be married. His new wife was the widow, Rose Davidson—did I remember her, The Dentist’s wife? Rose had “means,” my father said, and after the wedding they were moving to Florida. Beverly was too uncomfortable with the pregnancy for a long trip and I went alone to New York for my father’s wedding, a small ceremony and luncheon held at the St. Moritz Hotel. The new Mrs. Robbins was old Mrs. Davidson from apartment 1-A, a stout lady with blue hair. At the luncheon, they revealed that Rose was establishing a haberdashery for my father in Miami to be called “Bernrose.” They felt it sounded better than “Rosebern.” Eventually they would become absentee owners and use their time to travel. Rose’s older sister was present and made several remarks about my father being “a real catch.” He was charming to all, exhibiting a savoir faire I had never observed in him. “The young marrieds,” as the rabbi, winking, called them at the ceremony, said they were going to Israel on their honeymoon. I saw them off at the airport, my father and his new wife bound for Tel Aviv, and I returned to Los Angeles.

My mother was dead. My father had remarried and was moving out of New York. Except for a trunk containing old belongings, all my ties with my childhood and with the neighborhood had been severed.