Shining Through (16 page)

SHINING THROUGH / 113

“You already told me about his face. Come on, move south.”

I was blushing, not believing we were having this conversation walking past Steiner’s Hardware with its window full of drill bits. “Tell me what he’s like downtown.”

“Well…” I paused for a second. “Mom, he’s wonderful.”

“No kidding! Oh, Lin, baby, that’s terrific!” She reached out to put her arm around me and, with her left foot, stepped on the edge of the insole of her right sandal and tripped herself. I caught her as her knees buckled; we both pretended it hadn’t happened. “Is Johnny”—she gave me a girl-to-girl smile, happy, delighted for me—“fun?”

“Well, you know, he’s quiet. We don’t talk all that much.”

“The quiet ones surprise you.” She raised her voice over the honks of cars and the rattle of trucks. “All those words they don’t say go straight you-know-where, if you get my drift. Am I right or am I right?” she demanded.

“You’re right.”

“So?” she said, as the light turned green and we crossed the street. “What do I gotta do? Get down on my hands and knees and beg you to talk?”

“After work, I’ve been going to his place.”

“And? Come on! Be fun!” I didn’t know what to tell her: Hey, it’s just great, Mom. We’re having a swell time. Or the truth: Mom, you wouldn’t believe what it’s like with us. We can’t wait for it, working all day, acting normal, being polite, and then finally, when we get to his apartment, almost tearing at each other. But all those in-between times, between the desk and the bed—good manners, a polite smile or two and…nothing.

“And,” I finally answered, “I can’t believe it’s actually happening to me.”

“You’re in love, sweetpea?”

“Yes.”

“And him?” Just then, she stumbled again, but before I could reach for her, she recovered on her own. “It’s nothing. Damn ankle straps.”

I tried to be gentle with her. “You know, you’re looking a tiny bit pale—”

114 / SUSAN ISAACS

“Lay off! I ran outta rouge.” She shut me up in a voice I hardly ever heard—hard, hoarse: the voice of a tough old broad.

I wasn’t going to be shut up. “Mom,
please
. Have you been feeling okay?”

She changed back to her cutesy voice. “It depends on who’s doing the feelin’.”

“Have you been eating?”

“Sure. The olive in the martini. My green vegetable.” Her oldest joke. “Now stop changing the subject. How does Big John feel about Little Linda? Huh?”

“I think…” It wasn’t just that she’d aged. Every trace of her beauty was gone. You looked at her sallow, sunken face and scrawny arms and legs, and if you hadn’t known, you would never have realized Betty Voss had once been the ultimately desirable female, a soft-mouthed, hazy beauty with a halo of white-blond hair and huge, liquid eyes. You’d think she’d been a sad little wallflower who’d grown up into a pathetic, drab drunk.

“Don’t be shy about telling me about Johnny, lovie. I know the score when it comes to guys and gals.” She smiled. “He’s nuts for you, isn’t he?”

“Yeah, Mom.” I said. “He is. Absolutely nuts. He can’t do enough for me.”

“Linda, it’s about time you’re getting what you deserve!”

Almost every girl in the office had some sort of outside interest.

Gladys’s, naturally, was Lives of Important Lawyers; her eyes took in the society page with such intensity it was a miracle the paper did not ignite. Lenny Stevenson was such a Giants fan that she actually lived in a rooming house eight blocks from the Polo Grounds. Wilma Gerhardt loved clothes (
expensive
clothes), and Marian Mulligan probably had every color nail polish ever produced during the entire history of Hazel Bishop—including Ripe Plum, a red so close to purple that her boss, Mr. Wilson, asked her please not to wear it to the office anymore. (She took that as a compliment, deciding that her nail polish was SHINING THROUGH / 115

too wildly exciting for a place of business; she claimed that when she wore it on weekends, she was besieged by passionate glances and had even had a couple of offers.) So my particular outside interest, the war, was probably considered eccentric, but it was accepted. I bought the
News
each morning, but as the situation in Europe got hotter, so did my desire to know. By the end of the afternoon there would be a pile of
Suns, Journal-Americans, Posts, Tribunes, Mirrors, World-Telegrams
, and
Timeses
, all donated by the girls themselves or recovered from the bosses’ wastebaskets.

The girls could no more understand my need to read every version, every interpretation of what was going on than I could comprehend why anyone with half a brain could work herself up over Ripe Plum or the Giants, but they were willing enough to help me with my hobby, as long as I didn’t bore them by talking about it. Oh, sure, they’d join in a fast discussion of the Dunkirk evacuation, like, Gee, all those little boats were really something. But if I did anything like ask, Was Dunkirk inevitable? all I’d get would be a couple of shrugs, a sigh, and then Gladys pointedly clearing her throat and demanding if anyone had heard that Mr. Nugent was keeping company with a girl in New Jersey whose family raised something—either cranberries or chihuahuas.

One afternoon, after John and I had been together (I don’t know what else to call it) for nearly three weeks, he glanced down at the stack of newspapers on my desk and asked, “How come you save all those papers?”

“I read them,” I said.

“Oh,” he said. “Good.” Then he smiled in his most automatic way and wandered back into his office. I wondered whether he realized how interested I was in what was happening in the world or whether he just assumed I liked to clip recipes for Ground Lamb Supreme.

By that time he’d learned I could cook. After our first endless, awful restaurant dinner, we’d given up on going out to eat. But because we worked so late, we had to come up with something; it’s hard to sit in a taxicab gazing hungrily at each other while your stomachs make grumbling noises.

116 / SUSAN ISAACS

So the fourth or fifth time, John asked, “Can you cook?”

“Well, nothing fancy, but I’m pretty good, especially with German dishes. My grandmother taught me to cook, and she was terrific. Did you ever try
Gefüllter Krautkopf?
” He shook his head, and it was pretty obvious he could live a rich, full life without ever trying my
Gefüllter Krautkopf
.

But the following Monday when we arrived at his apartment, I opened the refrigerator and instead of finding the slab of cheese and bottle of milk that we’d been grabbing, there were four lamb chops (four! lamb chops!), some potatoes and carrots.

“If you feel like cooking…” John said.

I practically leapt into the refrigerator at the chance to try something else to please him. I clattered about while he wandered into the living room to go through the briefcase he’d brought home with him.

I sliced perfect, tiny carrot circles. I boiled the potatoes and mashed them till they were absolutely lumpless. (I had to do it with a fork. Either Nan wasn’t much in the potato department, or she had gotten the masher as part of her divorce settlement.) And the meat! I hadn’t had a lamb chop since 1929, before the Depression. I broiled them. They were perfect.

And so every night when we got to his apartment, I cooked, he worked. We ate. And then…Dinner itself was the only real problem. When it came to the bedroom, real life with John was far better than my dreams. But the long conversations I’d imagined—with John guiding me into a deeper and richer understanding of the world, of Europe at war—still remained dreams.

Give it time, I told myself. When it stops being so…wild, out of control, he’ll give you a chance. And in fairness to John, he had twenty partners—worldly men—he could have stimulating conversations with. He wasn’t starved for someone to talk to, the way I was.

One night in early June, right after Dunkirk, we sat over broiled chicken and rice with absolutely nothing to say, after SHINING THROUGH / 117

he’d given me a congenial “Nice rice.” It was late, after eleven, one of those nights when we’d been unable to keep away from the bedroom. After almost two hours there, I’d come out and cooked. But once off the wrinkled, sweaty sheets, he was tired and had nothing to offer me, not even an “It certainly is getting muggy,” or an “I love the way you looked in there a minute ago, standing and cooking.”

We sat at a table—dark wood, plain white linen place mats with Nan’s white monogram, plain white dishes—in the dining room. I couldn’t stand the silence, broken only by a clock ticking.

It just burst out of me: “What did you think of Churchill’s speech?”

“What?”

I put my voice down real low and took on an English accent.

“‘…The New World, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the Old.’ Did you like what he said?”

John looked a little taken aback, as if his chicken breast had spoken. “Churchill’s quite articulate,” he finally said. He smoothed the lapel of his beige bathrobe. It was the softest cotton, with light brown piping, so fine—and so neutral—I knew it had been a gift from Nan.

“I know he’s articulate, but what I was talking about was, you know, the
meaning
of what he said.”

His eyebrows went up a little. “The meaning?”

“Yeah, the meaning. Don’t you think what he’s saying is that it’s inevitable that France is going to be beaten to a pulp and that all that’s going to be left is England? Well, England and America.”

“It seems that way.” He gave me a warm smile and combed back the front of his hair with his fingers.

“I’m not saying that it’s not a brilliant speech,” I went on:

“‘We shall fight on the beaches…We shall never surrender.’

Nobody, not even FDR, speaks like him.”

John didn’t say anything. For a minute I assumed he was being thoughtful. And then I realized: I was wearing his undershirt.

The strap had fallen off my shoulder and he was 118 / SUSAN ISAACS

staring at that. His mind, the mind everyone swore was so astute, so brilliant, so original, was not on Winston Churchill.

But I tried again. “Come on. Listen to me for a second. What I’m wondering is, for all the good this speech is doing for English morale—and I bet it’s doing a lot of good—don’t you think it’s a terrible message to be sending the French right now? Look, no one’s saying there’s any real hope, but don’t you think—”

John stood, walked over, pulled me out of the chair. He eased the strap off the other shoulder. The undershirt slid down to the floor. “Who wants to talk about politics?”

“I do.” I looked at his beautiful intelligent face. “Hey! I have an idea. Why don’t you do something crazy, something you’ve never tried before? Talk to me for five minutes.”

“Come on, Linda. You know I think you’re very intelligent.”

“Then talk to me, damn it. Listen to me.”

He started to kiss me—my eyes, my cheeks, my mouth. “You listen to me,” he whispered. “We’ll talk about politics some other time. I promise. But right now…you’re driving me out of my mind. You know that, don’t you?” He pulled me down to the bare wood floor of the dining room. “Let’s do it again. Right here.” And I was ready. More than ready. I tore at the sash of his bathrobe, wildly eager.

Maybe my mother was right. Maybe what I was getting was what I deserved.

9

S
noring, my mother sounded like a huge, slow, rusty machine.

That would have been half bad. What made it worse was that she talked—yelled, actually—in her sleep. “SWEETIE!” she roared, exploding the soft silence of the Sunday morning.

“
Sweetie!
” Sometimes I thought she was dreaming about my father, but she could have been calling one of her barroom guys, whose names she could never remember.

“Sweetie!” reverberated throughout the neighborhood. It was too hot to close the window; if I did, my mother would wake up soaked with sweat, retching. I knew that from experience.

“Sweetie!” Whoever she was hollering at in her dream wasn’t giving her the time of day.

I stretched my neck to look out the living room window from where I was sitting. Just my luck. Across the street, Buddy Knauer and his pregnant wife, Sally, who had gone to high school with me, were standing on the stoop of their two-family house, shaking their heads at my mother’s howling. They were on their way to church. Their three dimply little girls came skipping out the door in their candy pink, daffodil and powder blue dresses, looking like Easter eggs. So Buddy and Sally just tsk-tsked at another “Sweetie!” with Christian forbearance.

If it had been a Saturday, Buddy, a telephone company in-staller, would have yelled across the street, Shut up, you goddamn bitch! and Sally would have tried to hush him up and then, later, tiptoed over and asked, in a voice like liquid 119

120 / SUSAN ISAACS

sugar, Can’t you do anything about your mother, Linda? I always wanted to ask her a question back: Can’t you do anything about your idiot hairdo, Sally? Thirty-one years old—like me—and still pinned back the sides of her hair with bows. Teeny orange bows that Sunday, like dead goldfish glued to the sides of her head.

You really got to know your neighbors in the summer, and it wasn’t only from sitting on the stoop. Summer meant wide-open windows, and I could hear them all, just like they could hear my mother. Mrs. Schwarz next door talked to her cat, Peaches, like they were best friends: What do you think, Peaches? Too low-cut? Think it’ll cause a riot? On the other side, Jerry Morris-sey practiced the “Toreador Song” endlessly on his accordion, even after his mother begged him to stop. And the Herrmanns, who lived above their candy store on the corner, kept their radio tuned to a shortwave band that broadcast Hitler’s speeches.

They were a fat couple who obviously ate too many of their own Baby Ruths. Their mouths were usually stuffed; they hardly said anything, except
Danke
when you paid for your paper, although now and then a little chocolate dribbled out between their lips.

But certainly no political opinions. So I never knew if the Herrmanns sat on their couch listening to Hitler with nougaty smiles or expressions of horror on their faces.