Storm Tide (5 page)

“I think you know there is.”

“And would you like that to happen?”

Neither of us spoke for a long time. “Judith, you have a husband. And from what people say, Gordon is a very nice man.”

“You didn’t answer my question.”

“Yes,” I said. “I’d like it to happen. If I didn’t feel I was taking you away from someone who’s weak, who can’t defend himself, who—”

Judith closed her eyes. She held up her palm: stop. When I did, she said this: “David, you can never take me away from Gordon.” We both heard the chill in her voice. “There are no models for the way Gordon and I live. We do not fit a mold. We do not ever try to hurt each other. We don’t have affairs. We do have close friendships. Do you understand?”

I did not. I said I did because I could not imagine refusing this gift.

“It’ll be all right,” she said, kneeling on the rug in front of me, laying her cheek on my lap.

She undressed me slowly. She moved her fingertips from my neck to my breast bone to my nipples. She sighed when I touched her. She grabbed my wrists to govern the speed and pressure of my hands. She wanted it to last, she whispered. It had to last all night and all week until the next time. When I touched her between the legs, she arched back reflexively. She seemed to quiver. When I entered her, she gave a short cry. The first time I made love to Judith, I thought I had hurt her, but she explained that great pleasure could almost be a kind of pain. We lay awake in each other’s arms, barely moving—estivating, she called it, nearly asleep but fully aware—making it last. “Trust me,” she said. “Don’t you trust me? Why so glum?”

Because even then I knew, it would not be all right. Even as I traced my fingertips down the bridge of her nose, to her mouth, to her breasts. Even as my cheek touched her naked belly, I knew it was wrong.

J
UDITH

    Judith had a birthday party the day before, with twelve candles on the chocolate cake. Her mother had given her a new flowered rayon skirt. Her other father, Sandy, had given her a necklace with a golden rose on it. Yirina, her mother, had her call Sandy “Daddy,” which was okay with Judith. Sandy’s full name was Sanford. He told her New York Jews of his generation all had names like Sanford and Sherwin and Marvin and Walcott. They wanted to be WASPs he said, but of course as soon as Jews used those names, the WASPs dropped them. Sandy had hair like his name, and he was suntanned even in April, her birth month, because he was a painter for real and a housepainter for money. All week he worked, but he spent weekends with them.

Now today, her real birthday, they were having another birthday party with Dr. Silver. She was very careful with Dr. Silver. Her mother’s American name was Jerri Silver. She was not married to Dr. Silver, who had another legal family, two daughters and a wife named Sharon, but when Mother had been buying the papers that would let her enter the U.S. as an immigrant, with Dr. Silver’s secret sponsorship, she had taken his name. Mother had thought he would marry her, pregnant with his son.

“If you had been born a boy,” Yirina said oftener than Judith liked, “he would have married me. All that American wife has given him is two daughters, no better than you.” But then ten minutes later Yirina would kiss her and take her on her lap and tell her how precious she was. Judith had only not to cry, not to speak and to wait, and her mother’s love would return.

“We’re lucky he acknowledges you, think of that, child.”

“He doesn’t acknowledge me. I have two sisters I’ve never seen. I know about them but they don’t know I exist.”

“So it must be,” Yirina said. Dr. Silver visited them every Wednesday night and he gave Yirina money. They always needed money. Mother had various jobs. She had met Sandy when she was playing cocktail piano in a restaurant-bar right off Prospect Park. But they had got rid of her a couple of years ago. Mother said she was getting too old for that work, but Judith did not believe it. “You’re beautiful,” she told Yirina. As with so much else about her mother, it was impossible to know her age,
which varied up to fifteen years depending to whom she was speaking and her mood. According to Yirina, she had escaped Czechoslovakia in 1938 when she was fifteen, eighteen, twenty, and once, twenty-three.

Yirina had baked both cakes and decorated them. She had sent Judith into Prospect Park where the daffodils were in bloom, to cut some and hide them in a bag pinned into her old coat that no longer properly buttoned. They looked lovely in the vases Yirina had brought with her from Mexico. Yirina had taken out the good tablecloth she always washed by hand, with fine embroidery of birds and flowers. Yirina had had it since her years in Turkey, during The War. Judith’s mother could always make a feast. She could make a celebration out of a chicken, a couple of candles and a bottle of cheap Chianti. She could make a celebration out of a sunny afternoon and tuna fish sandwiches in Prospect Park. For Judith’s father, Dr. Silver, she was wearing her best red dress of real silk and the diamond necklace that went in and out of the pawnshop several times a year. It was very important that they please Dr. Silver. Judith wondered if she ever really pleased him. Was he happy she existed? Did he wish she had never been born? She was always covertly staring at his square face, impeccably shaven, and trying to read his feelings for her.

Once again Judith unwrapped the flowered skirt that her mother had wrapped in the same paper, carefully opened the night before. Dr. Silver was a stout man of medium height, a bit stooped. His hair was all white, even the hair that bristled from his nose and ears. His eyes were a pale luminous blue, but Judith had dark eyes like her mother. Sometimes she tried to find herself in her father. She had her mother’s dark hair, her mother’s pale skin with an olive tint. Dr. Silver was ruddy. She was small like her mother, small for her age. Her mother could pretend she was ten for several years longer, when they occasionally went to the movies. But she had her father’s hands, what Yirina proudly called “a surgeon’s hands.” Long-fingered but quite strong. She had his long narrow feet. Her mother’s feet were small but wide. Her mother wore size 5C, a size they looked for in sale bins or rummage sales at the nearby churches of Brooklyn.

“I’ve brought you something I noticed you need, Judith,” Dr. Silver said. “I hope it’s the right size.”

“I’m sure it is,” Yirina said. She had been on the phone with the doctor’s secretary, for Judith had listened, pressed against the wall. The doctor’s secretary, a formidable woman called Cindy, was the only person in the doctor’s world who knew Judith existed, except for Dr. Silver’s lawyer. When Judith was little, Cindy would give her lollipops on the rare occasions Judith and Yirina went to Dr. Silver’s office. Now that
she was older, Cindy gave her magazines from the office. Judith studied them for clues on how an American woman was supposed to be. Cindy did the doctor’s shopping for him, for his wife, Yirina, and all three daughters, the legitimate and the illegitimate. That was a word Judith brooded over. People spoke of the legitimate theater. And children. She was a bastard. When Yirina lost her temper, she called her daughter that. To which Judith, if she was furious, would yell back, “Whose fault is that?”

But it was her fault for being born a girl, apparently. Dr. Silver sat at the head of the table, his hands in his lap. They had eaten the cinnamon-flavored chicken. (Her mother cooked Czech; her mother cooked Turkish; her mother cooked Mexican; her mother cooked American. Yirina said proudly that she knew a hundred ways to cook chicken.) They had eaten the lemon poppyseed cake, a particular favorite of Dr. Silver’s. When he was in the little three-room apartment, everything swirled around him sitting stiffly until he retired into the bedroom with Yirina and Judith was told to watch television on the set he had bought them five years before. They did not watch it much. Judith had homework every night, which she did passionately. Dr. Silver gave her a dollar for every A she got and fifty cents for every B. She managed to bring in almost all A’s. A good report card could feed them for several days. But she also wanted to prove to him she was worthy, of value. She hoped that her grades were better than the grades of his other daughters.

She opened the package carefully, automatically saving the paper and the ribbon. It would all be used again. Sometimes the ribbons turned up in her clothing or Yirina’s. Inside was a red spring coat. “It’s beautiful!” she said. “Can I put it on?”

It was truly beautiful, and a little big, but she would not say that. She knew Yirina had wanted it that way so that it would last longer. She paraded around the table, as Yirina told her to do. “Doesn’t she have fine posture?”

“Like a little princess,” Dr. Silver said. “Judith, I hope you are improving your grades in math.”

“I like science better,” she said. “But I’m working on the math.”

She was named after Dr. Silver’s grandmother, who had died the year she was born. Who had never known about her. She was a secret child. She kissed Dr. Silver dutifully. She could feel his slight embarrassment. They were both awkward at affection with each other. She felt he liked her but could not love her. Often she wondered if he loved his other daughters. She fantasized sometimes that they all shared some holiday, Passover or an American holiday like Thanksgiving. “I’m going to visit my half-sister Lisa this afternoon,” she would say. They would all become
friends. She would have a real family as others did, instead of only her mother, old photos and Yirina’s shape-shifting memories. If they only could meet her, she knew they would like her. She would please them. She would.

Then it was time for Dr. Silver and Yirina to retire into the bedroom and for Judith to turn on the TV loud until, about an hour later, they emerged. She hated those times but she gave no sign of her feelings, because she understood this was how Yirina kept Dr. Silver coming back. She minded less with Sandy, because he spent the night and she slept on the daybed. Other nights she and her mother shared the double bed. Sandy was almost like a real husband.

They had a small apartment on the top floor of a narrow brownstone in a neighborhood just turning Black. Most of her classmates were Jewish, like her, but not like her. Most had two parents. At school she said her parents were divorced, but that her father came to see her once a week. That was acceptable. She learned what she could say about her family life. She did not bring friends home. She was careful whom she trusted. Dr. Silver paid for her Hebrew lessons at a local synagogue; it was understood she would have a bat mitzvah next year, although Dr. Silver would not be there. Sandy would, if he was still with her mother then. Judith had learned not to take such continuity for granted. But Yirina said of herself, “At least I know how to please a man. That’s important, Judith. If he pleases you, that’s nice, but it’s icing on the cake, you understand me?”

“I won’t need to please a man,” Judith said, when Yirina was going on about speaking softly and laughing in a pleasant refined manner. “I will work and make money.”

“I don’t work?” Yirina laughed dramatically, tossing her head with the black hair all teased up in a new style. “I just sit on my fanny all day. Who would have known from the way my back aches?”

“If I go to college—”

“We must get Dr. Silver to help you go. We must!” Yirina’s mood changed abruptly. She was wearing her house smock, sitting at the sewing machine with material all over the kitchen. She was making drapes for a lady in the next block. Yirina did alterations and made draperies and slipcovers. She had signs up at all the dry cleaners. “My own mother tried to tell me I should go to college. She was a doctor, Judith, back when there were few women doctors. She had an office on Listopadu.” Whenever Yirina used a Czech word, a name from Prague where she had grown up, her face changed. It softened. A nostalgic glow came upon her. “She tried to make me get an education, Judith, but I wouldn’t listen. I was a pretty girl, and I thought that was all I
needed. I went to university, but my classes meant nothing to me. Only boys mattered. Never be like that, Judith.
They
can take everything from you, your money, your home, every possession, your name, but an education, Judith, you can take that with you wherever you go.” Then she leaned forward, staring at Judith, as if to see into her bones. “You must speak properly, not the way they do around here. They talk like hoodlums. You must speak like an educated person. I have an accent. But you have no reason to have one.”

Judith usually remembered to speak a different way at school with other kids than at home. Sometimes she forgot.

A week after Judith’s bat mitzvah, paid for by Dr. Silver, but attended by Sandy, there was a phone call from Cindy. “Jerri,” Cindy said. She always spoke so loud that Judith, sitting next to her mother, could hear both sides of the conversation. Yirina, who had excellent hearing, held the phone away from her ear while Cindy was bellowing. “Jerri, it’s Dr. Silver. He’s had a heart attack. He’s in the hospital.”

Dr. Silver never recovered consciousness. Cindy said they should not go to the funeral, but Yirina disobeyed. Yirina got Sandy to drive them (it did not matter anymore if he went with them, since Dr. Silver could no longer ask who he was) to the cemetery, way out on Long Island where they had never been. It was a cemetery in a wilderness of cemeteries. They stood well back. Judith stared at her sisters. They were older. The widow was blond and so was one of the daughters. They were dressed in suits and hats.