Evergreen Page 11

  She grew hot. The palms of her hands were wet. Oh, my God.

  “Have I embarrassed you? But we shouldn’t feel embarrassment with each other. These things are natural, aren’t they?”

  “You don’t seem as happy this time,” Dr. Arndt remarked.

  “I don’t feel as well this time.”

  “Each pregnancy is different. Carry a sweet cracker with you in your purse and don’t wait too long between meals. In another two months it’ll be over.”

  Wise and fatherly Dr. Arndt.

  Joseph bought a brand-new Model T Ford for three hundred sixty dollars. “I need to get around,” he explained. “Malone and I are going to fix up this house and turn it over fast. We’re going in for real estate in a big way, I tell you! I have a lot of confidence in Malone. He’s honest and he’s smart. The two of us are going places.”

  “I’m glad.”

  “Have you noticed how things come in bunches? Bad or good. We got the house and we’re having another baby. Things are really looking up!”

  “I know.”

  “I’ll be able to start paying back next September. I figure I’ll be able to give Mr. Werner a thousand dollars. I really ought to go and thank him personally, don’t you think? For a total stranger to do what he did!”

  “People like them are too busy,” Anna said faintly. “A note would be better.”

  “You think so? Well, perhaps you’re right. Do you still feel sick today, Anna?”

  “Yes. The nausea—it’s dreadful.”

  “Maybe we ought to get another doctor.”

  “No, it will pass soon.”

  If only I had someone to talk to. If I had my mother. But would I tell such a thing to my mother? God forbid. The rabbi, whose wife goes daily down the street with the rest of the women, pushing the carriages to the dairy and the butcher? Dr. Arndt, who will come to deliver my child while Joseph waits in the other room? Impossible.

  Ruth came up to visit one day. They walked over toward the river behind Maury on his little tricycle. Ruth prattled down the list of her children. Harry had skipped a year, still at the top of his class. Irving had a business head; no doubt he’d go in with his father. The girls were such a joy; what a difference it made living and going to school uptown! But Cecile was overweight; she had such an appetite for sweets—

  The air was heavy. Anna could hardly breathe.

  “Why, you can hardly walk!” Ruth cried, becoming aware.

  “I’m all right. Ruth, you’ve seen a lot of things, I want to tell you something terribly sad. There’s a girl up here, the women are talking about her, she had—well, she had an affair, you understand. I feel so sorry for her; you see, she’s married and she thinks—she knows her husband isn’t the father of the child. Can you imagine such a terrible thing?”

  “You feel sorry for her? I’d call her a whore!”

  “Yes, of course, it’s awful! But still, you know, one can feel sorry for such people.… The poor girl, she made a mistake, one mistake, and now—I don’t know what to tell her.”

  “What to tell her! My advice is, stay away from her. Friends like that you don’t need.”

  “Of course. But what’s to become of her?”

  “Why worry your head over such a person? She made her bed, let her lie in it. Right?”

  “I guess you’re right,” Anna said.

  The new life grew and fluttered awake. Anna thought, I need to love it, I need to long for the sight of its face. But she did neither. Poor thing, poor thing, this creature feeding in her, not wanted in her. At night she lay awake. Joseph’s hand loosened on hers; he liked to hold her hand as they lay together falling asleep. If only she could have turned to him and cried out for help.

  If only she could tell the truth! Sometimes the truth came rising to her lips so that she tightened them in fear of its escape. The words had a taste. They had a shape and color: bloody red in the darkness. She could hear their sound as they would fall into the quiet room.

  Terror plucked at her skin like something alive, and ran over her body, raising the little hairs on her arms.

  Joseph said, “I wonder how Maury’s going to take it? Maury, would you like to have a baby brother or sister?”

  He planned aloud. “I hear there’s going to be a vacancy on the corner, five rooms on the second floor. Time we graduated from this dump! And then in a couple of years,” he said, “maybe well even move to West End Avenue! Might as well aim high, right?” He threw Maury over his shoulder. “How’d you like to live on West End Avenue, son? Think you’d like that?”

  My God, he doesn’t see that I am strangling.

  She got out a book of poetry. The contents were listed under Consolation: Courage: Suffering. She read from Henley’s Invictus (what pompous nonsense!) to Kipling and Shakespeare. There was no consolation. You had to find your own courage. She put the book away.

  One Saturday afternoon she said, “I’m going to look for a hat. You can take Maury for a while, can’t you?”

  “Of course. But it’s going to rain.”

  “I’ll take an umbrella.” She had to get out. Last night she had dreamed about a long, curved, evil knife. Someone was coming toward her raising the knife. But who would want to kill her? She ought to do it herself.

  The traffic rolled on Broadway through the rain. If I walked in front of the trolley, just stepped quickly in front as it came down the hill, it would all be over. But then—Maury. My little boy. Oh, my little boy.

  She struggled in the wind. Her heart began to pound. The seven-months-old burden pressed down in her enormous belly. No strength. No strength at all. If I fall, I’ll scream, scream it all out here on the street and everyone will know. I’m losing my mind.

  The wind drove the greasy rain into her face and soaked behind her collar; wet wool clung to her neck. The wind rose and the rain came raging. The day grew dark. People shouted, jostling for shelter in doorways, anywhere. There was a flight of shallow steps: a post office or a school? There were people scurrying up the steps. Anna followed, into a place that was dry and still.

  It was a church. For the first time in her life she had entered a church.

  On three sides there were statues and pictures. The vivid young man with bright yellow hair, his body twisted on the cross. A pale blue plaster woman: that must be Mary, the one they call God’s mother. Anna shut her eyes. I didn’t buy a hat and Joseph will wonder why I spent a whole afternoon just walking around in the rain.

  Someone began to practice on the organ, starting, stopping and starting again. The music rose like smoke, circling behind the gilded altar into the corners. She sat down and rested her forehead on the back of the seat and cried.

  Dear God, listen to me, if the temple were open I would go in there. No, I wouldn’t, I’d be afraid someone would see me. Dear God, I don’t even know whether I believe in you. I wish I were like Joseph because he believes, he really does. But listen to me anyway, and tell me what I’m to do. I’m twenty-four years old. I have so many years to live through and how am I to get through them?

  Someone asked, “Are you in trouble, daughter?”

  She looked up at the young priest, in his long black robe with the metal chain around his waist. She had never been this close to a priest. At home when you saw one coming down the road you went the other way.

  “I’m not a Catholic,” she said. “I only came in out of the rain.”

  “I don’t mind. If you want to sit here you’re welcome. But perhaps you wanted to talk?”

  A human being, a good face. And she would never see him again.

  “I am in such trouble that I want to die,” Anna said.

  “Everyone feels that way at some time in his life.” The priest sat down.

  How to begin? “My husband trusts me,” she whispered. That’s a stupid way to start. “He tells me I’m the only person in the world he can absolutely trust.”

  The priest waited.

  “He says he knows I would never lie to him
. Never—”

  “And you have lied to him?”

  “More than that. Oh, more than that!” She could not look at him. Not at the statue or the pictures, either. Down at the floor, at her own hands in her lap. “How can I tell you? You will think that I am—you will not want to hear, you’ve never heard—”

  “I’ve heard everything.”

  Not this. I can’t say it, no, I can’t. But I can’t keep it all alone inside, either. Not any longer.

  “Has it to do with the child you’re expecting? Is that what you’re trying to say?”

  She didn’t answer.

  “It’s not his child? Is that it?”

  “No,” she whispered. “Oh, my God, I would be better off dead!”

  “That’s not for you to say. Only God knows whether you would be better off and He will decide, you may be sure.”

  “But do I deserve to live?”

  “Everything that lives deserves to live. And certainly this child deserves it.”

  “I would feel better if I could pay, if I were punished.”

  “And you think you won’t be? Every day of your life.”

  The organ, which had stopped for a time, began again. The quiet music curled like smoke, like mist.

  “I’ve looked for the courage to tell the truth to Joseph. I’ve prayed for the courage, but it doesn’t come.”

  “Why must you tell him?”

  “To be honest, to feel clean again.”

  “At the price of his peace?”

  “Do you think it would be?”

  “You think about it for a minute.”

  But no thoughts came, nothing coherent except the face of her little boy. He was sitting on the kitchen floor eating an apple.

  “Is it, perhaps, that you love this other man?”

  “No. No, it’s my husband I love.” An easy answer. True, and yet.… Peace and life and goodness; Maury, child of my heart; all these, weighed against that short exaltation, that rapture.

  She cried out, “And so I have to go on like this!”

  “If you were blind or crippled you would. People do.” The priest sighed. “Human beings have so much courage, I marvel at how much.”

  “I’ve used up all my courage.”

  “You’ll find it again. And thank God for giving it back to you.” His voice was even, without reproach or sympathy.

  “I hope so.”

  “And after a while things will be easier for you.”

  “I hope so.”

  Perhaps he does know something. He hears and sees so many things. Surely this must have happened before to somebody else?

  The priest stood up. “Do you feel any better?”

  “A little,” she answered truthfully. Some of the weight had been relieved, as though she had taken it from herself and put it on him.

  “Can you go home now?”

  “I think I can. I’ll try. I want to thank you,” she whispered.

  He raised his hand. His heavy skirt swept down the aisle.

  The birth was hard. A neighbor took Maury and Ruth came to help.

  “Odd that this baby took so long,” she said. “The second is always easier.”

  Joseph studied the tiny girl in the bed with Anna. “Poor little thing! She looks worn out, too.”

  Anna sat up in alarm. “Why, is there anything wrong with her?”

  “No, no. Dr. Arndt said she’s perfect. I only meant, she’s thin and that makes her look frail.”

  She was not pretty, the way Maury had been. She had sparse black hair and a monkey face. She looked anxious. But that was absurd.

  “To think you two haven’t got a name ready for her!” Ruth said.

  “I left it to Anna,” Joseph explained. “Maury was named after my father, so now it’s her turn.”

  “My mother’s name was Ida,” Anna said.

  “Something beginning with an ‘I,’ then,” Ruth mused. “You don’t want Ida, do you? It’s so old-fashioned.”

  I’m so tired, Anna thought. What difference does a name make?

  “Isabel,” Ruth suggested. “Or, I know, Iris! That’s a lovely name. There’s been a serial in the paper about an English countess, Lady Iris Ashburton.”

  “Iris,” Anna said. “And now if you’ll put her in the basket, I think I could go to sleep.”

  Shortly after the new year she wheeled the carriage homeward from the grocer’s. Maury trudged along holding her free hand. Halfway up the street a man in a priest’s dark suit came abreast of them and stopped.

  “Boy or girl?” he asked.

  Heat surged into Anna’s face. It had been dark in that place, but he remembered.

  “A girl. Iris.”

  “Well. God bless you, Iris,” he said, and walked on quickly.

  God bless us all. The infant’s lips moved hungrily. “I want lunch,” Maury said.

  “We’re almost home. I’ll feed you.”

  And care for you both with all my strength. Where had it come from, this new strength? Like water in a river that had gone dry. Power flowed into her arms and legs, pushed her up the hill. I’m gritting my teeth; I must stop gritting my teeth. I am getting better, though. God bless us all.

  12

  The city stretched and spread. Its long legs touched the edges of Brooklyn and Queens, and leaped the bridges past the Bronx to the borders of Westchester. The city raised long arms into the sky. All along Fifth Avenue the wrecker’s ball, making way for new towers, crushed the Renaissance mansions of the millionaires. Those that were not crushed were turned into museums or offices for philanthropic agencies.

  Hammers rang, steel on steel. Huge cranes, delicate as a dinosaur’s head, moved over the street. Ten thousand rivets were driven between morning and night, ten thousand steel woodpeckers in a steel forest. Laborers climbed the great skeletons, forty stories above the ground, sixty stories, eighty. Up and up. Everything was rising, the towers, the stock market and the fortunes of men.

  These were the years of Harding and of “normalcy,” although they were not normal at all: such times had never been seen before and would not be seen again until after the next great war, a quarter of a century away.

  Those who in 1918 had counted their assets in hundreds of dollars could in a few years’ time, if they were canny, hard working and lucky, count them in tens of thousands or more. The building business exploded like a rocket. Houses were sold before they were finished. Land values doubled and tripled and doubled again. If you were smart enough to keep ahead of the forward movement you could turn a tract of empty acres on Long Island into a tidy community of two-family houses or six-story apartment buildings, into a lasting income or a splendid profit.

  Not that it was easy. The telling is a great deal easier than the doing. Starting from nothing, one had to work eighteen hours a day to get a foothold. One had to keep on at eighteen hours a day if one were not to lose the foothold. Because, once it was lost, how would a man ever manage to get another?

  A painter and a plumber began together with one small, heavily mortgaged apartment building on Washington Heights. They put themselves into it, all of themselves, their strength and every dollar beyond what they needed to buy the food on their families’ tables. They bought new stoves and bathroom fixtures. They scraped the floors; they repaired, they renewed from bottom to top. They painted every apartment and every hallway. They polished the brasswork and puttied the windows. They even bought two potted evergreens to stand beside the door.

  There was no building on the block, or for many blocks, that looked like theirs when they were finished.

  The tenants were astonished; it was years since the place had been so clean. A sign was put up outside: No Vacancies.

  And then they raised the rents.

  One morning a broker called. He had an investor, interested in well-kept, fully rented property needing no repairs. So they sold the house, having owned it not quite one year. Their profit was twenty percent.

  They went to the bank that held t
heir mortgage, to the real estate department. “See what we can do,” they said. “Now give us a mortgage on another building and well do the same.”

  By the end of the year 1920 they owned two houses on Washington Heights. Neither of them had had a new pair of shoes or an evening out since they began. They were plowing every penny back into property. They bought three vacant lots in Brooklyn. Then luck, pure luck, came into the picture, because the syndicate that owned the property adjoining needed their lots to put up a hotel. They named their price and the syndicate paid: it had no choice.

  Now they met an electrical contractor and a firm of masons, father and sons: could they not pool their trades and do some building of their own? The mason knew a lawyer who had clients with cash to invest. They bought more lots and built a row of two-family houses: it is wise to start small. They had to rise at four in the morning to get to the job in Brooklyn on time.

  The houses were sold before they were completed. A dentist down the block approached them with a proposition: would they be interested in a piece of Long Island land? He would like to go in with them. They could have the land for a song. Well, not quite a song exactly, but the price was right enough. More confident now, they built a whole tract of two-family houses, seventy-five houses and a row of stores.

  Cautious, patient, tenacious plan and labor. Brick on brick, stone on stone. Buy, build, sell, hold, pyramid and grow. Very slowly, so very slowly at first. Then faster and bolder. A loft in the garment district. A garage on Second Avenue. Big syndicates, big mortgages. Growing profits and a growing reputation. That is how it was done.

  And, of course, the times were right.

  The times were right for lawyers or brokers, for textile merchants, manufacturing furriers or wholesale jewelers. Immigrants and the sons of immigrants moved northward from the tenements to the simple, respectable reaches of the Bronx and Washington Heights. Most never went any farther than simple respectability. Others, the more clever and the luckier, kept moving with improving fortunes. As the great fortress apartment houses rose along West End Avenue, with their elevators and doormen in uniform, these families came down from the Bronx and Washington Heights to fill them. They came with brand-new Oriental rugs and silver, the acquisitions of an astounding, quick prosperity; brought, too, their vigor and a driving ambition.