Shining Through (38 page)

In one of my mother’s galoshes I found an empty pint of gin; there was lipstick around the neck of the bottle.

Her medicine cabinet was worse than her closet. Aspirin and Bromo Seltzer were hidden behind lipsticks, tins of rouge, boxes of powder and eye shadows. An open cake of mascara had dried and crumbled years before, so a fine layer of black powder covered everything.

282 / SUSAN ISAACS

John called around ten. He was in the office. Everything’s all right, he reported. Just the usual catastrophes. Are you managing, Linda? I’m fine, I assured him, and he asked, Would you forgive me if I cut you short now? I have hours of work here. I said of course, and we kissed each other good night on the phone.

The next day, I worked and I waited. The real estate man came, looked over the house and said he thought I could get two thousand dollars for it. Try for three, I said. Look, Mrs….

he said dubiously. He was a slick man in a suit too dapper for Queens and an Errol Flynn mustache. I gave him Russell Weedcock’s name and telephone number and said to him, My attorney. He’ll be handling the negotiations and the closing for me.

After he left, I went into the living room. I realized that for all the years I’d lived in that house, my vision had conveniently blurred. Now I saw how bedraggled everything was. The brown wool on the couch and the chairs had worn away completely in spots. White upholstery stuffing sprouted in little bumps on the seats and arms. One of the lamps was cracked, another chipped, and the lampshades themselves were threadbare and had brown burn marks from too-strong light bulbs. The little end tables I’d remembered as being pretty weren’t pretty at all; they were so flimsy that they shook if you put anything as heavy as a glass of water on their surfaces.

I turned away and went into the kitchen. It was in order—sparkling clean, in fact. Since my mother never ate, Cookie only had to cook for herself, but she’d cleaned, after a fashion; the faucets glittered like just-polished silver, although the corners of the floor were probably not meant to be noticed. Cookie had also bought: The pantry was crammed with row after row of canned candied yams, fruit cocktail, liver paste spread, and there were five large boxes of White Rose tea. I was fixing my lunch, cold candied yams and iced tea, when the doorbell rang.

“Coming!”

SHINING THROUGH / 283

I wiped my hands on the white cotton butcher apron I was wearing, one my father had brought home from the plant, and hurried to the front door. It wasn’t the gas meter reader. It was Gladys Slade.

“I…I hope you don’t mind,” she said. She held out a manila envelope. “Your mother’s deed. Um, Mr. Weedcock says it’s in order. He was going to send Mildred Treacher, a new girl, but I said…well, I said I’d come because—” She was overheated, nervous, her too-white face wet with perspiration, like a glistening hard-boiled egg; her dress, her best, a green faille with a white lace collar, was meant for a Christmas dinner, not an errand on a blistering July afternoon.

“Come in, Gladys.” I held the door opened wide.

“Oh, no. I don’t want to intrude—but I want to say—I am sorry for your loss.” Her speech was so jerky that I knew she’d memorized it, but she was so fidgety it was obvious she’d forgotten two or three sentences.

I took her by the arm and pulled her inside. “Hey, stop talking to me like I’m Mrs. Berringer. I’m Linda. Sit down.” Hesitantly, as if waiting for me to bark, What do you think you’re doing?

she inched into the living room. “How are you?” I asked.

“Fine.”

“Want some iced tea?”

“No, thank you.” She was inspecting the room: the tables, chairs, curtains. “It’s a nice house. Very homey.” I guess I had become accustomed to living in John’s world, because for a second I thought she was being sarcastic. But then I remembered her single, rented room up two steep flights of stairs in a stranger’s house. Gladys was gazing up, above the couch, at a picture of a field of red and pink tulips with a windmill in the background. It was framed, but without glass. In tiny letters on the lower right it said: Compliments of Roscoe & Schmidt Meat Packers 1908 Chicago. It had been a wedding gift from my father’s boss. “That’s a beautiful picture.”

“Thanks.” If John had seen it, he’d have smiled, a com-284 / SUSAN ISAACS

passionate it’s-so-pathetically-predictably-tasteless smile, full of pity and superiority. But Gladys was drawn to it as if it was the Garden of Eden. “Sit down, Gladys.”

“I don’t want to interrupt.”

“Please. There’s nothing to interrupt.” She sat stiffly, as I figured she would, on the edge of the couch. She’d come to see what I’d become, and probably also to find out if I’d given up the secrets of lunch, if I’d sat at parties with lawyers, regaling them with tales of their star-struck (lawyer-struck) secretaries.

But seeing me in my high-priced black dress under the butcher’s apron, my silk stockings, my expensive haircut, my wedding ring, she couldn’t ask. “How have you been, Gladys?”

“Fine.” She clasped her hands tight over her patent-leather pocketbook.

“How are all the girls?”

“Fine.”

“Lenny?”

“Fine.” She looked away from me, up at the tulips.

“Marian?”

“Fine.”

“Wilma?” She shrugged. “Oh, come on, Gladys. I’ve never said a word about anything. You can tell me what’s going on.”

She glanced around, as if still expecting to be encircled by cops, ready to arrest her if she opened her mouth. “I can see it in your face. There’s some news about Wilma! How can you possibly hold back on me?”

It took her a minute, but finally she breathed: “Fired!”

“She was fired? No! By Mr. Post?”

“None other than. Actually…I
knew
it was going to happen.”

“How?” I sat down beside her. I was dying to hear everything, and she knew it.

“Well, all of a sudden he started going home at six on the dot.”

“You think Mrs. Post gave him an ultimatum?”

“No.”

“No?”

SHINING THROUGH / 285

“Wilma did!”

“You’re kidding!”

“No. After she saw what happened with you…You know.

Getting married. At lunch one day, we were talking about you….” She lowered her head.

“Listen, it’s okay. If I was there, I’d talk about me too.”

Gladys, unthinking, put her hand on mine. “So Wilma says, real sure of herself, ‘Who says lightning don’t strike twice in the same place? There could be other bosses who find certain other secretaries definite marriage material.’ Anyway, two days later Mr. Post is rushing out at six, with his briefcase packed. And by the end of the next week…Well, at least he got her another job.

At Dahlmaier Brothers, the investment—Oh! You know about them.”

“I say a little prayer of thanks to Quentin Dahlmaier every night. Hey, remember when Lenny found out about him? God, that seems a hundred years ago.”

“Linda?”

“What?”

“I’m sorry. I mean about how things wound up with us.”

“I’m sorry too, Gladys.” There was a silence that was comfortable for a couple of seconds, but it stretched out too long. I could feel her yearning to ask: What’s it like? Being married.

Being married to
him
. Going to lawyer parties. Being rich. Is it everything we always dreamed about? But I realized I didn’t have any answers, not for her, not for me. So instead I asked,

“What about Anita Beane? Did she and Herbie get married?”

Gladys sat up straight. “You mean you didn’t hear?”

“No! What happened? Tell me.”

And she did, for two hours.

When we finally said goodbye, we both had tears in our eyes.

And she had the picture of the tulip field tucked under her arm.

Late that afternoon, I went into Olga’s room. I’d gone through it soon after she died, but now, while I waited for the janitor from the Lutheran Home for the Aged on the other side of Ridgewood to come and pick up the furniture (the 286 / SUSAN ISAACS

Salvation Army had turned me down when I’d described what I wanted to give them, but the Lutherans were clearly having a bad year), I went into my grandmother’s room again.

There was nothing except her narrow, stripped-down bed, an armchair and a nightstand. For some reason, I opened the two small doors under the drawer of the stand. It looked empty, but I felt around and discovered a pile of papers neatly tied with string. They turned out to be about a hundred different recipes Olga had clipped from her favorite German newspaper.
Salat
von Geräuchertem Aal
, smoked eel salad;
Zwetschgenknödel
, plum dumplings—she’d taught me to make them. I groped some more and found another pile. Letters, all yellowed, some so old they were falling apart, all written in the thin, spidery penman-ship that was taught to girls in German schools. I realized they must have been from Olga’s cousins in Berlin. They’d probably been corresponding since she left Germany with my grandfather, in the late 1880s. But then I looked closely. One of the letters wasn’t a letter but a folded piece of parchment. I opened it up carefully and saw it was written in foreign letters that I was sure were Hebrew. I couldn’t get a clue to what it was, but I folded it back with the letters and put everything in my suitcase.

It’s so sad I can’t even cry, I told John that night when he called. There’s nothing left of my old life. I’m sorry, he said.

Friday was a bad day. There was nothing to do but call Con Edison and Brooklyn Union Gas and Russell Weedcock, and then wait for all of them to call me back. That night John said, When do you think you’ll be home? I’m not used to being without you. I told him that I’d probably have to stay through Monday or Tuesday, because Russell had papers for me to sign and I had to have an extra key made to give to the real estate man. I miss you so much, I told him. Linda, he answered, I know it’s not easy, but get all the ends tied up, so you don’t have to go back. Listen: I have an idea. Call me when you’re ready to leave, let me know what train you’ll be on, and I’ll pick you up at the station. If you can

SHINING THROUGH / 287

get in about six or seven, I could come right from the office…and then we’ll go out to a restaurant. I don’t want you having to cook on your first night back.

That night, in my old bed, I yearned for John. The desire was as strong and powerful as it had been two and a half years earlier, when I’d been his old-maid secretary. But the difference was that now I knew what I was missing.

So at six o’clock the next morning, I slipped my key and a note under the door of the real estate office, took a subway to Penn Station and then a train back to Washington. I got home in time for lunch, but I knew John would be at work. Still, I figured I’d have time for a nice long bath, and then I could go to his office. Surprise him. I did.

1 9

J
ohn wasn’t at his office. As I came through the front door, I heard classical music playing full blast. I put down my suitcase, smiled and walked into the living room. There was John stretched out on the couch. And in his arms was Nan Leland Berringer Dahlmaier.

“Oh, God!” They pulled apart. John sat up straight, stared at me for less than a second and then hung his head. I kept staring at him, wanting him to meet my eyes again. I couldn’t make myself look at Nan, but I sensed her inching across the couch, toward the safety of its big arm. But my mind wasn’t on her.

More than anything, I wanted to see John’s face, but all I could see was his hair. “What can I say?” he breathed.

“You’re really a wonderful guy, John,” I said. What a clear voice! I felt cool then, or at least in control. But a moment later, anger came upon me so suddenly and with such force that it was as if I was being attacked by a gang of toughs, kicked, punched. I could hardly breathe; I kept trying to gasp for air, but every time I did, my throat made a high-pitched squeal, like the cry of a helpless baby animal.

He’d abandoned me at the very moment when I needed a friend. He’d betrayed me. Toyed with me that weekend in Maryland. I had been stupid enough to believe that his tenderness, his kindness, had risen out of love. Well, I thought, I guess it did. Love for Nan.

I turned to her then. She was scrunched up in a corner of the couch, clutching the arm. Her head was lowered too, but 288

SHINING THROUGH / 289

in terror, quivering, as if expecting that any second I’d pull a gun or rush over and start to pummel her. “Oh, stop it!” I said.

She looked up. I thought to myself: All she inherited is good bones. Not her father’s guts, not her mother’s spirit. Her face was ashen—a close match to her perfectly cut beige linen dress.

I couldn’t think of anything else to do, so I jerked my thumb toward the door and said to her, “Out!”

John lifted up his head. “Please,” he said. “Don’t be angry with Nan. It’s all my fault.”

“No,” Nan interrupted. “It’s my fault.” She had her father’s eyes, and though they weren’t as black or as brooding, they were compelling—bright and dark at the same time. “I know I can’t ask your forgiveness, Linda…May I call you Linda?” I just glared. That shut her up for a minute, but then she said, “The last thing I want in this world—and I know I speak for John too—is to hurt you. This entire situation—”

“I want you to leave now,” I told her. Somehow I was polite.

Like in the movies, when you say: Madam, would you please remove your hat. “
Now
.”

“Please. Hear me out. I know all three of us are in a state of shock, but personally, I feel a…a moral imperative—”

The politeness evaporated. I bellowed, “You’re pushing your luck!” I took a step toward her, around the coffee table, which had their two cups and saucers and the morning papers spread on it. My shin smashed into the table, but I didn’t feel a thing.

The dishes rattled hysterically. Then I took another step.

And Nan Leland Etc. Etc. was out the front door in five seconds flat.

For me, there were no tears, no screaming, no enraged slamming of doors. As for John, he just sat there. I stared down at the cups; there was just enough left in them to reveal that she, too, took her coffee black.