A Change of Skin (30 page)

When you say that, smile, pardner.

Sure, smile, Dragoness. Laugh. And when you and Jake hid in the closet you had to put your hands to your mouth and nose to keep from laughing. At first her voice was as calm as usual. “Beth, Jake, come on, we have to go out.” She was making an effort to control herself, you could tell that. You held back your laughter. “I'm telling you to come on. They're waiting for us. We shouldn't be late.” Jake pinched you and you shook silently. “Children, children, where are you? It is Friday evening and they are waiting us. The food will get cold. Be good now. There's going to be matzo balls and gefilte fish. Don't that sound good? Children, come on out now. It's late already and they're waiting.” Jake pinched your thigh and you tugged on your braids to keep from laughing and your mother's voice rose and began to tremble. “They're not here? Out with their father, that's where they must have gone. I bet they went out with their father! Bethele, Yankele, where are you? You are tormenting me, stop it! Come on out! The Mendelssohns will be insulted! On time we can never be now, please, please!” You and Jake held hands, waiting, calm now, quite certain of what she would yell next. “Beth! Jake! You're scaring me! You're making me afraid! I'm afraid, don't you hear me? I'm afraid!” With your eyes closed in the darkness of the closet you could see her clearly, her hair drawn severely back but as always wavy and electric with tones of copper, a few rebellious wisps surrounding her pale, transparent, veinless face. Her thick arms and her knotty hands extended beseechingly.

“Beth, make the light.”

She would never turn on the light herself. She always asked someone. And when the light went on, her hands would move absently to her forehead as if she were brushing something away. One Friday a month you were invited to the Mendelssohns. The Mendelssohns who had known Rebecca's parents in the old country and here were successful, already well-to-do, and Rebecca when she came in from the street, from the half darkness of that thirteen-block walk, would put her hand to her forehead, brushing the light away.

“Gershon took them with him.”

You and Jake stood laughing beside Gershon at his stand in the street. He sharpened his razors and now and then shouted: “Razors! Good honest razors!”

You laughed hardest once when he reached out and stopped a man with long hair and a curly beard and asked him: “You still are going to shul?” The man nodded and your father laughed and by the lapels of his coat pulled him closer. With a swift movement of a razor, he cut off a lock of the man's long hair. He laughed. “See how good they cut? Razors, razors, fine sharp razors!” And the man stood there, stupefied, first touching his shorn hair, then grabbing the oily lock from your father's hands while howling incomprehensibly in Polish. You and Jake rocked with laughter and Gershon frowned and shouted: “Now he is trying to insult me! Not yet has anyone ever been able to insult me, and now he is trying! How much is it worth to you, eh? Two cents? Three? For three cents' worth of hair he's calling me names! Listen, my friend, the man who can insult me has not yet been born! Razors! Razors!” And the Polish Jew walked away caressing his lock of hair and muttering and you and Jake and your father laughed and the man in the next stand, who sold neckties, held his wares up to his customers' throats and Gershon shouted: “Mordecai, those are ties you are selling, or sausages? Mister, let me tell you, to buy a tie from Mordecai is like to buy a rope from the hangman. Those ties have been stolen.”

Mordecai curses and at the ceremonial meals one Friday a month Mr. Mendelssohn says sadly: “Complaints, complaints, always he has only complaints, Mrs. Jonas. Everything fails him. I have to tell you, Mrs. Jonas, your husband is a schlemiel. There is no point for me to waste my time and my money to try to help him.”

“Mama, what is a schlemiel?” asks Jake as you walk home that night. Rebecca moans. Her felt hat is crooked and sticks out too far over her forehead, making her face of anguish look foolish; her figure, yellow and black, pale in the half-light, look absurd.

“And so long I have known you, I could be wrong? Just a bum, wasting his time with other bums who are there only waiting that a tenth man should be called for prayer. Not from faith. From pure laziness. Without even believing in the words! Waiting, always waiting ever since his teens, for a handout to come along, for the sky to drop easy money.”

You and Jake came out of the closet holding hands, laughing, shivering. Becky stopped in the darkness of the living room, paralyzed, as if she didn't believe her eyes. But the surface of normality had always to be preserved. She hid her surprise and said only, “Good, it's late already, they are waiting us, there'll be pumpernickel, Mr. Mendelssohn knows how much you like pumpernickel. My hat, Bethele, where's my hat? Please get it for me. I thought you had gone out with your father. So now let's be going.”

Mr. Mendelssohn talked. Only Mr. Mendelssohn. A shame, Mrs. Jonas, an eternal shame. And the very Jewish merchants who sell these products have been the worst enemies of the kosher laws. An eternal shame, I say. You and Jake ate greedily, rye bread and bagel, your eyes staring at the way Mr. Mendelssohn's wing collar moved as he swallowed. Mrs. Jonas, the Reform Jew is no less than a renegade. It is good that you at least stand fast. Your children should owe you more than they will suspect. With tears in her eyes, Rebecca nodded.

“You will not make renegades of my children!”

Gershon shrugged. “Renegades? No. Invisible, yes. Just invisible, Becky. Can you understand that?”

“Superstitio et perfidia Judaica.”

Invisible, Dragoness. Ah, yes, all of you.

Franz listened and you lay face down on the hard bed and told him everything. The pillow you had pulled over your head muffled your words. You told him that you loved your beautiful Northeast. Fertile, ripe New England. White winter when you can hear sleigh bells and the old men smoke their corncob pipes standing around the iron stove in the general store, and the children make snowmen with lumps of coal for eyes and a carrot for a nose. The hills with their silver fir trees, silhouettes drawn in lean ink, the ice-encased poplars. The pond frozen over, couples skating on it wearing red scarves and wool caps, thick stockings and tweed skirts and earmuffs. And the brief afternoons around the open fire are lovely.

That's what you told Franz, Dragoness?

Yes. Night comes suddenly and you lock yourself in your room to read, lying on old cushions in the seat of a window that looks out on the red barn fences, the undulating low hills striped and spotted with rich black earth, the stables where the horses breathe white vapor. Your brother Jake gives you a ride on his sled from the top of the highest hill. You're afraid. He laughs at you. He makes you sit on the sled and tells you to hold tight, Lizzie, hold tight, his hobnailed boots kick the hard and lumpy snow and down you go, your arms wrapped around his waist, while flakes of snow, those dancing jewels, arc in two waves of frozen dust on either side, whitening your caps, yours of blue wool, his of black leather with a black celluloid visor, down you go, the wind whipping your cheeks, your nose and your ears and your fingers numb, dodging fence posts, the naked trunks of fir trees, the hummocks of snow-covered bushes.

“Yes, so I took them to Macy's to see Santa Claus. That bothers you?”

Jake puts the sled away. He drags it sadly to the shed where it will rest until next winter. The shining sled, just painted, with your name on it:
LIZ.
Now it is rust and peeling paint and your name has long ago disappeared. Puddles of water from melting snow surround the farmhouse. Though a cold wind still lashes the shutters, your mother sets out to paint the house white, the pine siding, the gables, and to paper the rooms within with scenes of old-time country merrymaking, shepherdesses in crinoline carrying crooked staves and surrounded by sheep and by young men who lean against the cypresses and toot on flutes.

“Mr. Mendelssohn's children spent Christmas on a farm in Connecticut.”

And now, Franz, spring comes. Fine gray rain turns all the country roads to mud and forces us to wear our rubber boots as we tramp around the chicken yard throwing fistfuls of oats to the chickens that run away from us, clucking, with their feathers made smooth and lustrous by the rain.

“In Prague, in 1473, the Jews living outside the Judenstadt decided to move into it and join their brethren. No one forced them. They went into the ghetto voluntarily.”

Spring, the season when your mother sells the hogs she has fattened all winter in their protected pen, feeding them yellow corn and oats, sells them to Mr. Duggan, the owner of the general store (Duggan? Duggan, Dragoness? Well, why not? Duggan), and you and Jake on your way home from school pass the store and sadly look at Porky, Fats, and Beulah lying in the window with red apples in their mouths.

“Can Beth spend the weekend at the farm with us, Mrs. Jonas?”

Restlessness enters through the open windows of the classroom and the attentiveness of winter vanishes. Miss Longfellow (Longfellow, Dragoness? Okay, Longfellow) wears a look of impatience and again and again, rapping the desk with her ruler, orders them to keep their eyes on their books. But she herself, rosy in her print dress and new permanent, can't keep from glancing at the cherry tree that grows outside the window, and one day, after reading aloud (“The Mississippi is well worth our attention, children. It is not an ordinary river but on the contrary is in all ways remarkable”), she suggests that all of you look at the cherry buds, the most beautiful and softest of all buds, that little by little have sprouted and opened and now, in April, fill the window with whiteness.

“I'm going to go to City College, Mama, and I don't care what you say. Do you think that there I'll see anything I haven't already seen? Where in God's name do you think we live?”

On Easter Sunday you show off your new bonnet …

“That one, Mama! The straw with the red ribbon. Please!”

… and the entire congregation joins in the hymns. And outside in the warm sun the farmers rest for a day, sitting on their porches with straws in their mouths, telling stories. All week they have mowed and raked and filled their silos and loaded their trucks with the oats and wheat that grew under the winter snow. Today they rest in contentment.

“So what the hell does it mean to be a Presbyterian or a Baptist? Eh, Lizzie? Instead of…”

Then beautiful summer. Even though Jake went away after the winter and spring we had spent together. He made new friends and took school excursions and went fishing and swimming in the pond …

“Polio, Mr. Jonas. It is polio.”

… and made trips to the ocean, to a fishing town that still remembered the great days of whaling and the houses were gay, painted in vivid colors, and everyone was happy, at home with the sea …

“It's a punishment upon us! A punishment! Let me hold you in my arms, Jake, my little Jake! Oh, it's a punishment upon us.”

But the ocean wasn't for girls. Dressed in muslin you ran and skipped as you walked alone all the long hot summer, discovering an entire world of creatures that during the rest of the year were in hiding: squirrels and lizards, crickets, spiders, owls, deer, caterpillars and butterflies, robins and larks in the woods where you spent your days beneath the song-filled almond trees and the great sycamores …

“Jake! Lizzie! Come quick! The truck that sprinkles the streets is here. Hurry, quick, take off your clothes, quick before it goes away!”

… with their soft green bark that you pulled off in strips to make little boats with newspaper sails on pine-twig masts. You sailed them on the little lake, in a favorite corner far from the shouts of the diving boys …

“Liz is a kike! Liz is a kike! Liz is a kike!”

Cool hours beside the cool water. The voices of the birds that had come home from winter in the south. The low voice of the robin, the imitative song of the thrush, the agile notes of the blackbird, the crazy chirruping of a magpie. You could tell them by their songs and you were grateful for their lack of fear as they came near you. Robin with his red breast, as if he were a soldier or a musician in a royal band. The thrush's round eye and black-striped shirt. The star on the forehead of the blackbird. The slanted eyes and soft roundness of the magpie.

“Let me go on, Javier. Let me have my dream. I am willing to play your game. Now you let me play mine.”

You touch the canary when you open its cage and put in the seeds and water. Rebecca moans and asks that you draw the curtains.

“Do you have a headache, Mama?”

“Ach, it's the heat, the heat. It will go away.”

All afternoon beside the almost motionless surface of the pond. You looked at the water and thought of a palace beneath the ice of winter where summer's birds and creatures could live protected and warm.

“And Israel Baal Shem Τοv taught us that true salvation lies not in Talmudic wisdom but in full devotion to God, in the simplest faith, the most sincere prayer. A simple man who prays with all his heart is closer to God and more loved by God than the Talmudic scholar.”

Bengal lights and candied apples; carousels with white horses; noisy organ-grinders; mirrors that made you look larger and fatter or smaller, like a dwarf (Jake, where is Jake?); the magician whose summer tour brings him to town in July with a top hat and a menagerie of hungry rabbits, trained crows, and blind mice that appear from the folds of his red and black cape, like Mandrake. Pitchers of lemonade and strawberry water; shavings of chocolate and orange peel. The porch with its rocking coaster covered with blue and white striped canvas. The farmers sowing again under the sun: straw hats, blue denim shirts. Oh, say can you see, you have fought all wars, Mama loshon, Na-Aseh V'Nishma, we will do and we will obey, let us go to America said a Jew from Kiev to his wife after he had lost his fortune in a pogrom. Let us leave this hellish place where men are beasts and let us go to America where there is no ghetto and no pale, where there are no pogroms, where even Jews are men.