Читать книгу A Long Island Story - Rick Gekoski - Страница 9

2

‘You’re a saint, you know that? Or whatever they call them, a saintess? I don’t know how you do it . . .’ Michelle smiled in response, stacking the plates in the sink, as Frankie finished his coffee at the kitchen table, still talking, distressed.

‘I can hardly bear the thought of it! Trouble, that’s what we’re in for! There’s trouble wherever she goes, trouble in spades . . .’

She dried her hands, walked back to the table, put her arm round his shoulder.

‘Don’t you worry so,’ she said. ‘It’ll be all right. I’m looking forward to it. Addie and I can do things together sometimes, take the kids to the park, go out for an ice cream.’

He laughed because it was so unfunny.

‘The park? An ice cream? My sister? She’d rather clean out the sewers, she hates anything that keeps her away from her films and art and trips to the city to see her crappy friends. Did you ever meet that ghastly, pretentious . . .’

‘Frankie! I’ve met them all!’

‘And they were just as dismissive of you as Addie is: just as rude and superior. God, sometimes I hate that woman!’

‘Don’t, please. It makes it worse for all of us. They’re fine, I don’t need them to like me. I can look after myself. After all, I have everything she wants!’

He looked puzzled.

‘What? Wants? Wants what?’

‘You! A wonderful husband who can’t keep his hands off me!’

His sister certainly didn’t have a wonderful husband. Ben was all right in his way, amiable and undemanding, but Frankie had never forgiven him his allegiances. His sister had married a Communist, been corrupted by him, made foolish decision after foolish decision. Protest meetings, picketing, petitions! This was the United States, for Christ’s sake, and Frankie had served his country proudly. He’d had a quiet war, never seen action – which he did not admit publicly – served his time as a naval dentist at various postings, come home entirely unscathed, having seen no more blood than that produced by a root canal.

But he was a patriot still, living in the greatest country on earth, and he resented his superior brother-in-law with his theories and hoity-toity arguments. After a few early skirmishes they had decided to banish politics from their conversation and soon found they got on fine, playing tennis and pinochle, going out with the children, schmoozing at the bungalow. He was all right, Ben was, just misguided. For a time Frankie called him ‘the Red’ but Michelle hushed him up. ‘Next thing you know,’ she admonished, ‘one of the children will repeat it, and the next thing you know there will be a scene!’

She was a sensible woman, he could count on her. He rose to come behind her as she worked, pressed himself against her.

‘I have a good idea,’ he said.

She laughed, and pressed back gently, rolled her hips. ‘Later maybe, after they leave. The kids aren’t due home till after lunch. But now I have to make some coffee cake, there’s just time before they come.’

He wet the tip of his index finger and put it in her right ear, rotated it suavely. She was more sensitive on her right side, ear, throat, breast, big toe. He’d never encountered that before, not that he had a lot of experience, a few rolls in the hay when he was in the navy, nothing really. And he would never have noticed it in Michelle until she showed him early on in their lovemaking. It was odd, and oddly exciting, like playing some sort of organic instrument.

She looked at the magazine spread open on the counter, bent over unnecessarily to peer at the page, shuddered a little, gave a tiny moan.

‘Stop it now, there’s plenty of time, and what I’m really excited about now is this new Betty Crocker recipe. I had it at Irene’s last week. It’s yummy!’

Frankie withdrew his finger, unsurprised by her reaction, anticipating the pleasure to come, his head filled with delicious images. Coffee cake? Phooey!

‘Oh, for goodness’ sake! Why bother? They’re just coming for a quick coffee and a look round number 42. I can pop out to the bakery and get some rugelach.’

She paused for a moment to consider.

‘No, I’d rather make something welcoming, make the apartment smell nice when they arrive. Maybe you could straighten the living room?’

He was quite prepared to take a sexual rain-check, happy to go out to the shops if necessary, would have chopped nuts manfully for the coffee cake, but the idea of making his apartment sparkle for his sister’s visit was unsupportable.

‘Come on, honey,’ he said. ‘The place is already neater than hers ever is. They live in a complete pig sty, toys all over the place, beds unmade, dishes in the sink . . . It’s disgusting. If she notices our apartment at all, it’ll just be to mock us. Petit bourgeoisie! The hell with her! I’d prefer to make it messy.’

Michelle laughed, measured a quantity of flour, put it aside.

‘OK,’ she said, ‘just leave it. I don’t mind, and you’re right, she wouldn’t notice, and Ben doesn’t care. We’ll just have coffee and eat this lovely cake, then mooch round to the Silbers’ for them to have a look . . .’

‘My fear is that they’ll like it.’

‘They don’t have much choice, do they? They’ll have to move, they’ll have to live somewhere, it’s cheap enough, we’re here . . .’

‘That’s what I want to avoid. They could live in Huntington Station, there’s new apartments going up there, not very expensive, near the railroad station.’

Michelle paused, unwilling to be too explicit. ‘Not a very nice neighbourhood,’ she said. ‘Maybe it isn’t too safe, you know, for the children, or going out at night . . .’

‘So it has to be here, then?’

Michelle nodded firmly, unusually decisive.

‘It does. Get used to it. You and Ben can play tennis and pinochle, Addie and I can do things with the kids, it’ll be fine. I’m looking forward to it! And we’ll have a free lawyer!’

Frankie laughed humourlessly. ‘And they’ll have a free dentist. Who gets the better deal? And who’s paying for it when he has to study to pass the goddamn Bar? Paying for months and months. My father, that’s who!’

‘It’s very generous of him. I don’t know how he does it . . .’

‘Don’t ask! I don’t either. But he won’t be helping us when we have to move to the new office.’

The doorbell rang at precisely eleven, as they knew it would. Addie was casual about time-keeping, as befits a left-wing social worker, but Ben was lawyerly in his habits and already counted the minutes as assiduously as he would soon need to when he set up his private practice. Time is money.

Michelle answered the door, leaving Frankie still reading the Times, beckoning him with a bent finger at least to get up.

‘Good morning! I’m so glad you could come, this is so exciting!’

She gave Addie a brief hug, and could sense the recoil, and Ben a peck on the cheek. Frankie stood up and waved hello, limply.

‘Come in, come in!’ Michelle was aware that she was being hearty, talking too loud, could sense Frankie disapproving behind her back, tried to relax, took a deep breath.

Ben came in first, gave his brother-in-law a firm handshake and a slight smile that acknowledged many things, looked round the immaculate room approvingly. There was a comfortable sofa with a chintz cover that hadn’t been there last summer. He sat down on it, sighed, sunk into the feather cushions, adjusted his position, crossed his legs, took a deep whiff of fresh cake smell. He’d had only a light breakfast, knowing Michelle would rise to the occasion, would need to.

Addie was embracing Frankie gingerly, the distance between their bodies measured in inches, then stopped starkly still in the middle of the room, as if unsure where she was, and what was expected of her.

‘Nice of you to have us,’ she said, looked round, joined Ben on the couch, unaware of anything delicious in the air.

Frankie resumed slouching in his chair, ignored the sharp desire to return to reading his newspaper – that’d show her! – and asked neutrally, without any warmth, if they’d had a good trip up to Huntington. Ever the naval officer, he always referred to North as up and the South as down, as if they were port and starboard, and if you confused them you’d be irredeemably lost, torpedoed.

‘It was fine,’ said Addie, ending the conversation. There was a further pause, which Michelle soon filled with coffee cake and a pot of weak coffee, and desultory conversation.

Plates and cups were soon rinsed and put away; it was time to get down to business.

‘Shall we go?’ asked Frankie, already heading for the door. ‘The Silbers are expecting us and they have to go out soon.’ Everyone knew this was a lie, and all were grateful for it.

The Garden Apartments on Nathan Hale Drive had been planned in the late forties, the first tranche up for rent a couple of years later. Though intended as affordable housing for the returning servicemen and their young families, there was nothing barracks-like about them. Each brick block was only two stories – a top and bottom apartment, one or two bedrooms, and each unit had a portico attached to the façade, making it look as if it were an individual house. Between the blocks the lawns had been turfed and maintained, trees were planted, beds of bushes ran along the walls. There were garden benches throughout, somewhere to sit with the paper while the kids played, perhaps talk to the other young parents.

A living community! proclaimed the brochures, but most of the residents regarded their tenure as temporary, until they could save up a deposit on one of the modest split level or ranch houses festooning the Long Island landscape. Only twenty years before, the Island was largely agricultural land. Now, within commuting distance to the city, it was sprawling suburbs, growing as relentlessly as a wart, and as unsightly. Nobody noticed, or, if they did, cared, that this new world was uniform and unlovely, because this fertile generation were desperate to become homeowners, for many of them the first home since their grandparents had emigrated from the old country. To own a house confirmed that one was an American, and to own a house first you lived in a garden apartment.

Harriet Silber had been informed, several times, that Michelle would supply coffee and cake before they came round at eleven-thirty, nevertheless a pot of coffee was on the table, plus a plate of pastries. She’d dressed up, after her fashion: wore a bright green smock with a wide front pocket, baggy dark blue slacks, a casual knotted scarf in bright orange: I am an artist, the outfit proclaimed, and a glance round the walls provided the evidence, with numerous paintings in the living room, ensconced in frames that were worth more at a junk shop than the pictures themselves.

Addie had heard of Harriet’s avocation, her pretensions, and had already branded her – before ever seeing her work – a local artist, a puffed-up amateur who has ‘exhibitions’ in some high school foyer and offers her daubs at prices that would buy you a good weekend in Manhattan. Addie looked, and, surprised, looked again. The seascapes and family portraits were competent, and – no doubt about it – Harriet cared about paint, in the laying down of colour, the nature and quality of brushstrokes, the depth and sheen of the oil. The pictures demanded a second glance, but did not repay it. A portrait of a young woman was painted in brutal impasto, in bright and unnatural colours, the turquoise hair contrasting with a face in lime green with blue touches. It hurt one’s eye. Harriet had looked carefully at German Expressionists and failed to learn from them. But the results were at least arresting. Not entirely bad. Not good.

Michelle glared at the plate of pastries, and Harriet shrugged her shoulders. You don’t entertain without offering a little something. It isn’t right.

Nor do you visit without partaking. Cups – the third of the morning for each of the visitors, they’d pay for that – were filled, rugelach chosen, one each. Ben popped his into his trouser pocket when he thought no one was looking. Addie was, and passed hers to him, a little too obviously.

He popped it into his mouth.

‘Delicious,’ he said.

‘I’m sorry the place is such a mess,’ said Charlie. ‘We’re moving in a few weeks and have started packing already . . .’

‘Where are you going?’ asked Ben, for Charlie was also a lawyer, who commuted to his office in the city.

‘Great Neck, there’s a new development there, just outside the centre, good incentives for first-time buyers and low mortgage rates. It’ll save me an hour a day commuting . . .’

Harriet nodded strenuously. ‘You bet! It’s going to make such a difference!’

‘What sort of difference?’ asked Addie neutrally, unwilling to reveal her unease.

‘Well, you know we came here three years ago, when our second was born, thought it would be a better life for us all? But it’s been hard on both of us . . .’

‘Hard? How so?’

‘Well, the commute for Charlie. He leaves just as the children are waking up and gets home after they’re asleep. That’s hard on all of us. But I guess I’ve never quite found . . . I don’t know what the word is? My place? No, not that, not quite. But I just don’t feel I fit in Huntington . . . I’m more of a city girl really, I love being near the galleries and theatres and shops, the restaurants. The people. Great Neck isn’t ideal, not by any means, but it’s bigger and closer. More cosmopolitan. Did you know Gatsby is set near there?’

Addie did. And Harriet’s description of herself was familiar: they were both city girls, and the suburbs were an inappropriate setting for them. Like planting orchids in a sandpit.

She looked round the apartment, the bits she could see from the table: the cramped kitchen, squat living room, the short hallway that led to the bedrooms . . . gazed out the window at the mothers and children in desultory commerce in the morning sunshine.

Awful. Just awful. They had similar accommodation in Alexandria, but DC was just a short ride away. They could use it, expose the children to it, make them aware that there was more to life than . . . this. This new home, that they could be moving into in a matter of months. She looked across the table at Ben, who smiled back automatically, in a sort of daze. Him? He wouldn’t mind, he had his work, and his writing, playing chess or the recorder, listening to opera on their new hi-fi, tennis and swimming at the Y. He’d actually like it. For a brief, unendurably intense moment she detested him.

‘But,’ said Charlie, anxious not to give the impression that he had been unhappy in his garden apartment, ‘we’ll miss it here, it’s very comfortable, nice neighbours, you can walk into town . . .’

‘That’s why we’re here,’ said Addie. ‘Is it the same as Frankie’s?’

‘The same?’

‘You know, same layout, same kitchen, same everything.’

The implication was not lost.

‘Oh no, each apartment is different is some way or another. We first tenants got to choose our own appliances and could modify the floor plan if we got in early enough . . .’

Addie rose from her seat, carefully avoiding the two cartons full of dishware at her feet, pushed under the dining-room table.

‘Can we have a quick look round?’

It didn’t take long, the Silbers anxious at the state of things: pictures removed from the walls left rectangles on the exposed paintwork, piles of blankets and bedding crammed into black garbage bags, the desolate air that makes any soon-to-be-abandoned home dreary and unwelcoming.

Addie walked through quickly, aware of her hosts’ embarrassment, anxious to spend just enough time not to be rude and get out of there. Anyway, it was exactly the same as Frankie’s, same floor plan, two crumby bedrooms, the larger perhaps ten by twelve feet, the other tighter and squarer, adequate for the kids. Small bathroom with bath and shower above, basic kitchen, basic appliances. More or less what she was used to in Alexandria, though preferable: lighter, slightly larger, more attractive yards. Better parking.

She tried to imagine what D.H. Lawrence might have said about it, but even he would have been speechless.

‘That went well, I think.’ Ben guided the car out of its parking place, checked the mirror twice and pulled away smoothly. ‘Yes,’ he added, agreeing with himself. ‘Nice people, pleasant apartment. Nice development. We can be happy here. Buy a house in a couple years, once I get established.’

He didn’t expect an answer and didn’t get one. They drove back to the bungalow in silence. It was hot in the car, baking, he wiped his forehead with the back of his hand, transferred the stickiness onto his pants.

Liar! She thought to herself. Goddamn liar. His attempt to be positive infuriated her. He knew as well as she did that it was a disaster, way worse even than Alexandria.

When they pulled up behind the Caddy in the driveway, Addie got out quickly, pausing only to say, ‘I’m sorry, I can’t do it. I won’t. You’ll have to find some other way.’ She didn’t slam the door, closed it delicately and firmly. Purposefully.

Ben looked at her back as she retreated, went into the porch and closed that door too. Enough with the closing doors! Pretty soon he’d be back in Alexandria, blessedly free of Addie’s balkiness – opening a door not closing one, and receiving a welcome the warmth of which made him tingle in anticipation. It had been a guilty secret for too long, only he wasn’t guilty about it any more. Might as well enjoy it while he still could . . .

They had arrived back East in 1948, when Jake was five and Becca one, when Ben got his job working on the Rural Electrification Projects for the Department of Justice. The young couple looked at apartments in DC, but nothing other than tiny one-bedroom units were affordable, and reluctantly found a halfway decent two-bedroom apartment in Alexandria, from which Ben could commute and in which Addie could fester.

She negotiated an agreement with her anxious-to-placate husband in which they spent Saturdays, when they weren’t all too exhausted or cranky, exploring the new city. Unlike Addie, Ben was unimpressed by the many monuments to America’s glorious slave-owning past and imperial present: the grandeur of American power revolted him. The Pentagon! The White House! The Senate! Lovely architecture, but so what? The glorious playground of hypocrites and bloated capitalists. Addie was happy, on a sunny afternoon, to walk round the Washington Monument or Lincoln Memorial with Jake, perhaps go to the Smithsonian, and would allow Ben to go off for an hour or two (with the baby carriage) to his favourite haunt, the Washington Cooperative Bookshop on 17th St NW.

He’d never encountered anything like it before: a shop, an inventory, a programme of events so Left-ward leaning that it was amazing it hadn’t fallen over (two years later it did), with a stock of socialist and Communist books and tracts, plus well-chosen new books on various subjects – all offered at discount prices to members of the Cooperative. Ben was soon on first name terms not merely with the staff but with many of the friendly browsers, believers and fanatics, not one of whom even glanced at his gorgeous baby companion.

On the noticeboard was a copy of the in-house publication, The Bookshopper, advertising the annual picnic in Rock Creek Park. In July, as always. It was supposed to be great fun. The Cooperative cultivated a family feel, had events and special areas for children, concerts, lectures. The members and their families were more congenial, more his types than anyone in Justice. He could go to a lecture or two, perhaps a concert. He’d smiled at the very thought and resolved to say nothing.

He’d heard the rumours, of course. Since 1941, when the membership list of the bookshop had been seized by Federal agents, there had been constant surveillance. At last year’s picnic an inappropriately chic woman, claiming to be a journalist, was taking pictures of many of the revellers, then asking their names and jobs. None had been willing to divulge much, but it had rather spoiled the atmosphere. A number of families left early.

As he’d leafed through the magazines, Ben was being watched, quite openly stared at, by a casually well-dressed man in his thirties, clean-shaven, slim and bright eyed – not one of the regulars! – who met his eye and gave the briefest of nods, as if to say ‘We know who you are. If I were you I’d put that down.’ Ben had, frightened not so much by the cool hostility of the glance as by its apparent knowingness. It was directed at him. At Ben Grossman. He’d tried not to let his shiver of apprehension show. He had nothing to fear from the Senator himself, who didn’t squash vermin personally, but the nice-looking young man could make Ben’s life more than miserable.

There was regular surveillance of the bookshop’s premises, after all it was a hotbed of Reds, a meeting place for Commies anxious to subvert democracy, Christianity and the American way. Nobody could read that much propaganda and come out unsullied; in fact, they went in sullied and came out filthy.

The spies in disguise were easy enough to spot. No G-Men shiny suits, no hats, no ties. They’d been told to wear slacks and sweaters to blend in, look round the inventory in an interested fashion, make a note of who was there and what was said. So they donned their pressed and pleated trousers, button-down white cotton shirts with V-neck wool sweaters, put on their shiny black shoes and lurked. The rest of the clientele, dressed in baggy flannels, loose fitting casual shirts, with long hair, often bearded, unselfconsciously scruffy, looked with amused disdain on their preppy interlopers, teased them, made speeches in favour of revolution: made themselves and their fellow travellers as easy to pick off, and to dispatch, as apples on a tree.

In the midst of this dangerous hothouse, Ben would avoid political discourse – after all he was a member of both devils’ parties – and devote himself to choosing his reading matter for the weeks to come. He made it a point to come most weekends; if Eleanor Roosevelt could lecture there, surely he could buy some books?

It was at the Cooperative Bookshop that Ben first encountered George Orwell’s unprepossessing little book of fiction – hardly a novel, more an extended fairy tale or allegory – entitled Animal Farm. There was a small pile of them on the table. The book had aroused more – and more heated – debate and discussion than any novel since the war. The hardliners deplored its anti-Stalinism, its all too easy rejection of a mis-described autocracy, branded its author a bourgeois, worse than a bourgeois, an aristocrat who went to Eton, encore les barricades, they intoned gleefully. But for leftists like Ben, who knew Stalinism to be as brutal, arbitrary and cruel as Nazism, Orwell’s finger was pointed in the correct direction.

From this time, Ben re-described himself as a socialist and in the 1948 election had refused to choose between one meretricious candidate (Dewey) and a slightly less unappealing one (Truman). Instead he voted for Norman Thomas of the American Socialist Party and felt himself richer, fuller, more upright for having done so. It was a romantic gesture, and a futile one according to Addie, who was scornful and dismissive. Why waste a vote on a loser?

Hadn’t they both supported FDR? And if FDR was a fancy pants, spoiled and privileged, no one was going to offer America a better palliative than the New Deal, and they (Communists though they may have been) were sensible enough to support it. The New Deal was the only deal for the poor, the disenfranchised and the downtrodden, though that category, in the early 1930s, included a great many people who, if they could be called workers, were workers in the banks and markets, in big (or mostly small) businesses.