The Belief in Angels (24 page)

I learned later it is the time after I went to sleep that Yetta is more interested in. Her parents are the only other people in the building who owned a television in those days and Yetta loved to watch television. She already knew my tastes are going to be quite different from hers.

Yetta is a most uncomplicated woman. The most important detail of our cohabitation for her would be how much time she would have to watch the TV programs she loved. One of her favorite is a show featuring short educational films called
The World in Your Home.
She loved to sit and watch this show, and others, during the week in the evenings. This didn’t bother me. Mocher and I loved to watch wrestling on the TV and spent many happy Sundays doing nothing else.

Our wedding date had already been set before we met. The
shadchen
and the rabbi arranged for it to fall before the Rosh Hashana holidays in August. We made a small wedding. The entire family had been invited but told not to bother with the expense of coming from New York for the simple ceremony. We are too old for a big celebration, and Yetta’s parents, who might have appreciated the fact that their spinster daughter had finally married, are dead. However, her six sisters are all there. They lived in the Boston area. Seven sisters in a family.
Oy
. Their poor
foter.
He must have been driven mad by all those women.

The day after our engagement dinner—to my surprise—I received a letter from Yetta. I found it stuffed under the doorframe, sticking out from the hallway rug, as I left for work early the next morning.

From this day until her death twenty-seven years later, this is the sole written missive I ever received from Yetta.

Dear Samuel,

I am writing to say to you how happy I am with this decision to marry with you. I am making ready to marry you with an open heart. This marraige my parents would be blessing with joy. They are gone now but I want you should know how much they wanted this for their daughter one day. And now you make good this dream of theirs. Yours is a good strong heart. This I know and the shadkhen she tell me also. So, I go forward and give you my dowry, which I not tell the shadkhen is more than she sees or hears from me. You will be a rich man with this marraige to me I can tell you now. I will give you the savings of my parents. This is what I have to offer you. I know I am a funny woman with a diffe-cult face. This I know. But for you, you can make a smile for me and this is a good thing.

Yours truly,

Yetta

I folded the letter back into the envelope and kept it in my pocket throughout the day. I kept pulling it out to read it again. It is a strange letter—an honest letter with a gift, the offer of wealth. This is what Yetta felt she could offer in exchange for the security of a marriage. Could I offer her security, I worried? Could I be a secure man?

I am a man with many names. Now, I am Samuel, the tailor. Samuel, the investor. An investor with more money to invest now.

Yes, I decided that day I would become a secure man to marry. I would make myself the man she wanted me to be and fill the role. I watched Mocher with Rose and I knew how to behave the husband. I could do this and it would be easy. I would be true and loyal. Fidelity is a given. I had no need for this woman. Why
would I need others? I would be dutiful and prompt. I went to work and I came home from work every night at the same time. No stops for a drink or a chat. I made few friends outside my family. No one else to visit.

Oizer invested the dowry Yetta brought me. Twenty thousand dollars, a huge sum at the time. It is indeed a large dowry inheritance from her father, who had a good real estate business before he passed. It made us a fortune. Still, I never stopped working. You didn’t stop working. Who knew what would happen? There could be another market crash. There could be a war to try and save oneself from. There could be a person to bribe in exchange for your life or your family’s life. There are always things you needed more money for. This is the one thing certain.

Yetta knew we are wealthy, but she never asked me questions or asked to see our financial books. She is a thrifty woman and never wasted a dime on anything we didn’t need. She never asked for more money than the household allowance I gave to her each month.

For the first year our marriage remained uneventful. The exceptions are the fumblings of our wedding night and the sad attempts at improvement that followed.

We are virgins and had absolutely no idea what we are doing. I suppose Yetta expected me to be practiced in the deed, but I had a paralyzing fear of seeing her naked body in a bed.

I saw many naked women in the camp at Majdanek. Dead women. My mind became so tightly shut against this horror it simply registered their anatomy as skin and bones.

I also felt quite self-conscious about my own body. Since my days in Paris, I’d spent most of my time sitting at a sewing table. My posture is terrible. My muscles are underdeveloped. My body is thin and, like those of most of the Ukranian Jews I knew, hairless. Not like the men I saw on my wrestling shows. I am embarrassed and ashamed of my body.

Yetta is, as most virgin brides are, shy and modest. She spent a long time in the bath on our wedding night and emerged wearing a peach negligee with so many layers I am worn out by the time I found the appropriate seams to open. She lay back on the bed, rigid. She never opened her eyes and spoke only two words the entire time we are consummating the marriage.

“Wrong hole,” Yetta mutters.

I am having a difficult time and don’t understand her. I whisper, “What?”

“Wrong hole,” Yetta says a bit louder, in a strangled voice.

All at once I lose my embarrassment. I am mystified and want to discover
what she is talking about. The idea that there is more than one hole seems astonishing. I need to see this.

Until this point I have been using my penis as a sort of shovel against the fabric between her legs. Now I lose my shyness and use my hands to part the onion folds of her negligee and at last see what she is referring to.

Another hole. A hole of a different sort altogether—unfamiliar and covered with a pubic hair similar to mine, but surrounded by lobes of skin and a small bump that sits above a different hole than the one I tried to breech.

Eureka! I almost shout my excitement in the discovery.

I realized my actions expose my lack of knowledge, and I am shy again. I manage to keep my erection long enough to deflower Yetta, but then roll over in a heap beside her and stare at the ceiling while I wait for my body to relax.

I wait for her to talk, but realize she’s waiting for me.

“Are you all right?” I ask.

She never responds, and I fall asleep. I have no idea how she feels. Did she enjoy what I did, or—if what I managed to glean from other men is true—is it a painful experience for a woman on her first time?

When I wake the next morning, Yetta is already in the kitchen making breakfast. I see on the sheets that she’s bled a bit. I think she must have experienced pain.

We made attempts a few more times over the next several months, but we never managed to find the right rhythms necessary to enjoy the act. And, of course, we never talked about it.

We shared no chemistry—so, after those first attempts, we stopped trying. We stopped trying and never exchanged bodily contact again, with the exception of an occasional misplaced foot in bed. I managed to satisfy myself, when I found privacy and time, in our bath. I’ve no idea if Yetta ever found any satisfaction on her own. I doubt it. To be honest, at the time, I had no idea women enjoyed any sexual contact beyond kissing.

I think if we had managed to find a way to satisfy our physical needs with each other, things may have gone differently for us. Maybe we would have created a more pleasant marriage experience or at least managed to become friends. But this is the beginning of what became a strained and combative relationship. We never talked to one another at all except to manage day-to-day details or share important information.

Later, after the child, Wendy, came to live with us, we used her to pass information back and forth. She is ten at the time, and we found we could communicate through her and didn’t have to bother with direct conversation. It is only after the child left—young, married, and pregnant with her own child—that we began
to find it necessary to talk to one another again. And it is only then that we found peace and comfort with one another. It is only then, many years into the marriage, that I begin to tell Yetta about the boy I had been and to share with her the man I had become. A man with his own mind and body who had been forced to leave a heart beating in a ditch.

All the while, she had waited, patiently, like the earth waits for the winter to end and the soil waits for warmth to bring spring growth.

Jules, 10years | September 19
^th
, 1971

SUNDAY MORNING

I WAKE UP and lie resting in Leigh’s bed. The twin-size bed is too small for us. Still, it’s always a good night’s sleep at her house without music blaring and people stumbling into my room in the middle of the night.

The dance was fun. Leigh and I danced almost all night and Leigh’s new boyfriend kissed her for the first time. With so much to talk about, we hung out all of Saturday. It was one of those rare warm September days so we went swimming at the jetty and came back to her place to play Monopoly in the late afternoon when it started to feel chilly. Leigh asked her mother if I could stay over again and she agreed. We had the eggplant parmesan leftovers for dinner. My favorite.

Being at Leigh’s is like having a vacation from my life—no chores, no loud parties with foul-smelling illegal things floating about, and only doing stuff kids are supposed to do. Lying in Leigh’s bed, it’s like I can feel my body—all my limbs connected, heart beating—for the first time in ages. I notice my fingernails need trimming and the hairs on my arm are bleached a light blonde. It’s the first time I’ve paid attention in a while.

Ms. Westerfield, Leigh’s mom, never likes anyone to call her
Mrs.
It’s a women’s libber thing. Wendy has started making everybody call her Ms. Finn too.

Ms. Westerfield also makes the best pancakes in the world. She obviously has an understanding that things are not great at my house, and she tells me, when I help her wash the dinner dishes in their cozy avocado green kitchen, that if I ever
need anyone to talk to, she will listen and try to help. I appreciate her kind words, but I can never share the things that happen in my house with an adult. I worry we’ll be taken away if someone responsible knows. I thank her and smile and tell her “everything’s all right,” even though we both know it isn’t.