Evergreen Page 9

  “It’s too bad when a family is split like that. You’ve no one close here for your children to know, except for Joseph’s mother, of course.”

  “She’s sixty-four,” Anna said.

  “Is she? I would have thought even more, she seems so old,” Ruth remarked.

  “She’s had a hard life. We wanted to bring her today, she’s never been at the beach. In all these years, imagine! But she wouldn’t come.”

  “What will you do when she gets too old or sick to keep the store?” Ruth was curious. “Do you suppose Joseph will want her to live with you?”

  “I don’t know. We’ve never talked about it,” Anna said, suddenly troubled. That gloomy, sour-smelling old woman in the house! Then came a wave of shame and pity. Poor thing, poor thing! To be old in another woman’s house, a strange young woman who didn’t want you!

  “If that ever happens and Joseph wants her, why, well have to do it, that’s all,” she said quietly.

  “You’re a kind girl, Anna. I’m glad for both your sakes that I sent Joseph down to talk to you that day.”

  “I’ve never thanked you,” Anna said, with embarrassment.

  “Pshaw! I wasn’t looking for thanks! But he thanked me, he was quite mad about you from the very first time. He thought you didn’t like him, that’s why he was afraid for so long to talk about marriage. You know,” she explained, “he thought you were in love with somebody else, but I told him you weren’t. If it had been anyone but Joseph I would have let him go on thinking so, because generally it’s a good idea to keep men guessing. But Joseph is different, he’s so—” Ruth sought the word—“honest. Yes, that’s it, he’s so honest.”

  “That’s true,” Anna said. “He is.” And she sat quite still while Ruth talked on, only half hearing, feeling, in the pouring sunshine, how good it was to be like this. Down at the water’s edge Joseph was throwing a ball to the boys. He looked like a boy himself, fast and happy. She could hear his voice ring. She hadn’t known he knew how to play. This was the way a man ought to be, the way he ought to live. Perhaps this was what God intended for man when He put him on the earth, to be free, to run in the bright air with all the other living things.

  But no, how was that possible? Who was to pay for it? Always it came back to that. This outing today, the carfare, the food, they had to be paid for. “In the sweat of thy brow shalt thou earn thy bread,” Joseph always said. He liked to quote from the Bible. It seemed that he could find an explanation for everything in the Bible.

  After a while the men came back and sat down. “Feeling all right, Anna?” Joseph asked.

  “Just wonderful!”

  “Tell me if you get tired.”

  “Tired! I’m tired of doing nothing!” She took her crocheting, a long rectangle of white lace, out of her basket.

  “Solly, look!” Ruth cried. “It’s gorgeous! What are you making?”

  Anna felt suddenly shy. “A cover for the baby carriage. It will go over a sateen lining, pink or blue, as soon as we know.”

  Ruth shook her head admiringly. “You know how to do things, Anna! You’re so clever, between baking and handwork—”

  “Tell her,” Joseph interrupted, “about the carriage,” and went on to tell about it himself. “We bought it last week on Broadway. White wicker, with a top that rolls back for sun or shade, whichever you want.”

  “Oh,” Ruth said, “the first baby is wonderful. You’ve plenty of time for it—Vera and June, stop throwing sand at Cecile! You ought to be ashamed of yourselves!”

  “Bet you don’t know what sand is,” Harry said importantly.

  “Sand? Why, it’s what’s on the beach,” his mother answered.

  “Hah! It’s rocks, ground fine, after millions and millions of years. I knew you didn’t know!”

  Anna picked up a handful. The fine, dry stuff poured between her fingers, sharp, twinkling particles on her skin. Yes, it was like pieces of rock, the shining splinters in rock.

  “So, you are getting an education from my son,” Solly observed, and in a lower voice confided to Anna and Joseph, “They tell me he’s number one in his class. He wants to know everything and he never forgets. You tell him something once, he never forgets,” he repeated with pride. Then, falling sober and silent, “I wish I could get ahead! I mean really get enough together so I could start a little business of my own.” He swung around, addressing Joseph alone. “Some people do it, I don’t know how. My boss started the way I am, but I never seem to get ahead.”

  “Five children,” Joseph said gently. “That takes some doing.”

  “Yes, yes, God bless them, it does. And I want to do so much for them all!” And he sat a moment, looking out to sea, as though an answer were waiting for him there. Then he jumped up.

  “This air gives you an appetite! How about feeding the hungry army, Ruth?”

  “Wait, wait, I’m coming!” Ruth admonished, unwrapping the paper bags, and delving in the basket, withdrew one after the other a corned beef, a salami, pickles, sour tomatoes, coleslaw, hardboiled eggs and two long loaves of dark bread.

  “And watermelon for dessert,” she finished. “Leave that in the shade till were ready for it.”

  “Cookies,” Anna said, producing a neat box tied with ribbon. “I baked yesterday, two kinds.”

  “And an orange for each of you children,” Ruth added. “Here, boys, don’t grab. Vera, keep your feet off the blanket, you’ll get sand in the food.”

  Joseph always said Ruth talked too much, Anna remembered with amusement.

  “Here, Solly, don’t eat so fast! That husband of mine, he’ll choke himself someday, God forbid, and the boys are the same. Now Cecile, on the other hand, I have to open her mouth and stick the food in, a bird eats more! Joseph, help yourself, there’s plenty. And make your wife eat, she shouldn’t forget she’s eating for two!”

  Anna met Joseph’s eyes and suppressed a smile. Again, their private language: “Don’t get me wrong, I like Ruth, she’s the salt of the earth. But if I had to live with her, I’d go crazy. Her tongue never stops: gabble, gabble, gabble.”

  Solly rubbed his stomach. “A real feast,” he sighed, and remembering his duties as a host, “You’re enjoying yourself, Anna?”

  “Oh, I am, I am! Think, here we are on the very edge of the continent! If you looked straight ahead across the ocean, all those thousands of miles, you’d see—”

  “Poland,” Ruth interjected. “And I’d just as soon not see Poland again, if you don’t mind.”

  “Not Poland,” Anna corrected. “Portugal. And behind it Spain. I’d like to go there someday. Miss Thorne was in Spain, her father was a United States consul there. She says it’s beautiful.”

  “Not me! I never want to see any part of Europe again.” Solly shook his head. “Especially now, with the way things are. They look very bad if you ask me.”

  “What do you mean?” Joseph asked.

  “’There’ll be war,” Solly answered seriously.

  “You always think the worst!” Ruth cried. “Why do you have to say such things?”

  “Because it’s true. As soon as I read last week that a Serb had shot the Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo, I said, There’ll be war, you mark my words.’”

  “Who was he, this archduke?” Anna asked.

  “The Austrian archduke, heir to the throne. So that means Austria will declare war on Serbia, and then Russia will come in with Serbia. Germany will have to help Austria; France will come in with Russia. And there you have it.”

  Joseph took another slice of watermelon. “Well,” he said practically, “all that’s across the ocean. It won’t brother us here.”

  Anna sat with her head down, fear running through her like water.

  And Ruth said with sudden insight, “Anna is thinking of her brothers. They’d have to fight for Austria.”

  “What’s the point of this gloomy talk of things we don’t even know about?” Joseph demanded. “Nobody can tell what’s going to happen. I’ll wa
ger it will all blow over, anyway. Nobody wants war, and here we are spoiling a beautiful day with worry over something that will probably never happen.”

  “You’re right,” Solly apologized. “You’re absolutely right, Joseph. Who wants to waste a day like this? Let’s go back for a swim.”

  The sun was low and red in the west. “That means it’ll be a hot day tomorrow,” Joseph predicted, coming toward the women.

  “The days I can stand but it’s the nights that are awful,” Solly said. “Sleeping on the fire escapes, it’s torture.”

  They gathered up the blanket and their baskets. “The girls will come with me,” Ruth directed. “Harry and Irving, you go to the bathhouse with your father and change. Well all meet at the entrance in front.”

  Across the boardwalk lay Surf Avenue and the roving crowds, the life of the evening. The sky was darkly streaked, gray against coal gray, smudged with a remnant of rose. The lights of the Scenic Railway arched and soared; the Ferris wheel hung like a spider web; in all the booths, lights winked and twinkled. Far ahead, band music blared and faded with the veering wind; near at hand the merry-go-round jangled. Anna was enthralled.

  “I don’t know where to go first!” she cried. “Where shall we start? Will there be time to see it all?”

  “Well do our best!” Joseph said. “Want to start with the Streets of Cairo? I went last year and you can walk right through a real Egyptian street, the real thing. They’ve got donkeys, you can ride on a camel—no, I forgot, you can’t do that, but you can watch and next year when we come again you’ll ride a camel.”

  She felt, and knew she was feeling, a child’s delight, perhaps even more than the children did, who began to be tired. So much to see and hear all at once! Such bright colors, and all the music was like colors! Spinning and wheeling, like one of those little machines—what did you call it?—a kaleidoscope, where you put in some simple thing, a piece of cloth or a couple of pins, and when you turned it endless, unfurling patterns came, a dazzle in the eyes.

  Then it was dark and time for the fireworks to begin. Too bad there wouldn’t be time for the side shows! But Anna had seen pictures of a calf with two heads and a dreadful bearded woman; she was glad not to go. Luckily they found seats for the fireworks, which were absolutely splendid: rockets of red, white and blue; stars that rushed into the night sky, each one higher than the one before, showered back upon the earth in a spray of gold. Last, the sound of cannon fire, shuddering and crashing until the final boom that almost shook you out of your seat. And silence. And the band striking up “The Star-Spangled Banner” while everyone rose in his place. Anna was proud that she was one of those who knew all the words: “—and the rockets’ red glare, the bombs bursting in air—”

  It was over. Ended and over, the wonderful, wonderful day. The crowd shoved slowly toward the trolley, the Coney Island Avenue line. Solly knew the quickest way to get there ahead of the rush. Otherwise they would never have got seats. As it was, the boys had to stand leaning on Joseph and Solly, each of whom held one of the sleeping girls. Ruth held the littlest one, and Anna took the baskets. People were standing all long the aisle, even hanging on the outside of the car. The conductors could hardly pass through the crowds; they were hot and sweaty and you couldn’t blame them if they were cross. They’d spent the whole day riding back and forth on the cars while all these others had been on the beach. It grew hotter and hotter as they rode through Brooklyn toward the bridge. The breeze died, and what little there was of it was moist. The babble of talk and laughter died, too. People are tired after the long day, Anna thought. Also, they are thinking about tomorrow. It almost takes the pleasure out of the day, this ride and the surging heat again and thinking about tomorrow. Almost, but not quite.

  After they parted with the Levinsons and changed to the Broadway car it was not so crowded, not so bad.

  “We’re lucky we caught the last car,” Joseph said. “It will be midnight before we get home. Did you have a good time?”

  “Oh, I loved it!” she said.

  “Put your head on my shoulder. I’ll wake you when we come to our stop.”

  She didn’t sleep. The bell jangled and the motorman sped up Broadway in the dark, the trolley swaying with the speed. She could feel the heat of Joseph’s skin through his shirt. “He’ll be burned,” she thought. They had forgotten the cocoa butter, left it home on the dresser. Perhaps it would not be too late if she put it on him when they got home. He had such fair skin.

  My friend, she thought. My one friend in all the world. Now I really know what it is to be married. Not fairy tales, she thought scornfully. No girl should know so little about life as I did: when I have a daughter I will not allow her to be so stupid, so unworldly. Tristan and Isolde. Fairy tales.

  And yet, yet … all that soft sparkle, the soaring and the singing, the longing, the touch, the ache and the sweetness, all of those, not true? I’m nineteen now, I ought to know. Why do I still wonder about it?

  Joseph bent down and kissed her hair. “We’re home,” he whispered.

  He helped her down the trolley’s high step. The wind came blowing from the Hudson when they turned the corner. Their shoes went slap and click on the sidewalk, the man’s heel flat, the woman’s needle-high, slap and click through the sleeping street.

  11

  The boy Maurice was born in his parents’ brass bed on July 29, 1914. He weighed seven pounds, and had a head of thick, light hair.

  “Three hours’ labor for a first baby!” Dr. Arndt exclaimed. “Do you know how lucky you are? At this rate, you ought to have six more!”

  Outside a newsboy cried alarm. “Extra! Extra!”

  “What is it?” Anna asked, and Joseph went outside to see. He came back with the New York Tribune.

  “‘Austria declares war,’” he read. “‘Rushes vast army into Serbia; Russia masses eighty thousand men on border.’ Solly was right. The war has come.”

  The doctor grumbled, “More crazy slaughter, and for what?”

  Anna said, “Eli and Dan will be in it.” There came a flash of old, old memory: Mama in her bed, the twin boys lying with her, some woman standing there, a neighbor or midwife. She seized the baby.

  “Nothing will happen to this little boy. I’ll never let anything happen to this little boy!”

  “No, of course not,” the doctor said gently.

  The years of the war were marked off in Anna’s mind by the growth of her son. She would remember that the Lusitania had been sunk on the day he took his first step holding on to her two fingers, and he only ten months old! When the Russian army drove the Austrians back to the freezing mountains of Carpathia—she trembled, shedding tears for Dan and Eli—that also was the time Maury said his first words. By the time the United States entered the war—the poster with the bloody hand: The Hun, his mark. Blot it out with Liberty Bonds—by that time he was almost three, genial, alert, delightful.

  She studied the face she had so longed to see, the features emerging from the formless round. The nose was straight. The eyes were almond-shaped and darkly blue. There was a cleft in the chin. Whom are you like, my son? Yourself alone, like no one in the world before you or to come.

  She felt profoundly that he had made a great change in her. She no longer thought of herself as a girl. A long age had passed since the time before his coming. He had enlarged her, so that she had new feeling for the blind man passing in the street and the young men dying in Europe. And yet, in an entirely opposite way, he had made everything but himself so unimportant that she didn’t care what happened anywhere, as long as he was safe.

  During the night she often heard Joseph get out of bed to go in to the crib, and she knew that he was listening for the baby’s breathing. No child had ever been more loved than this one! No child was ever more carefully fed and bathed, dressed and played with, than this one.

  “Maybe he’ll be a doctor,” Joseph said.

  “A lawyer would be fine, too.”

  They were able
to laugh at their own foolish pride. Yet they meant what they said.

  She read to Maury, long before he could possibly have understood the words. But somewhere she had heard that infants can absorb the sound and feel of words even though they do not understand them. So she read peaceful things, poems of Stevenson and Eugene Field.

  “Sleep, little pigeon, and fold your wings—little blue pigeon with velvet eyes.”

  In front of the apartment house the mothers sat with their carriages and strollers, observing, criticizing, counseling each other.

  “You need another baby,” they told Anna. “You’re spoiling this one. It’s not good for him or you.”

  Of course she wanted more children. And certainly Joseph wanted a large family. But none came. Yet really there was no great need to hurry. These years with Maury, only a few hundred days out of a long life, were too perfect to be wished away. All day long, after Joseph had gone to work before light, until he came home after dark, they had each other, Anna and Maury.

  Oh, little Maury, little boy!

  Darkness still covered the earth and the street lamps still burned near their bedroom window. It was not quite five o’clock. In another minute Anna would rise and make Joseph’s breakfast. It was hard to get out of bed these winter mornings. The water stopped running in the bathroom; he had finished his shower. Now he would hang the towels back on the rack and wipe the tub, leaving it without spot.

  His clothes for the morning were ready on the chair. He did everything with such care and method. His books of appointments and bills owed and money due him were all in order, so that he was always prepared, always on time, and no moment was wasted.

  He came from the bathroom now and stood at Anna’s mirror to brush his hair, making an exact center part. The clean overalls that she had washed were in their paper bag by the door with his painter’s cap. He always wore a suit on the way to work. It was not, she knew, that he was ashamed of his work; he took pride in his labor and skill. It was just that he saw this work as a way station on the road to another life. He saw himself, she understood, as a man who went to work wearing a collar and tie.