Dissident Gardens (6 page)

They kissed as passionately as they had in the booth at the Cedar, embraces that claimed a story was still in the making in the space between their bodies, and meanwhile she cradled his softening self until her awkwardly turned wrist was the only bony thing trapped inside the fly of his boxer shorts. Miriam had gotten more action on the bridge or in Washington Square, more thrill out of Porter’s elbow at her breast, his knee nuzzling her lap, than she was likely to find rustling in the shrinkage and stickiness in his pants. And then Rose came barreling in, a titan, Alice’s wrathful Red Queen in her quilted robe, her gossamer nightdress beneath it, her expression a storm of reproach, and the story abruptly had nothing to do with their bodies, with Miriam’s nakedness and desire and what Porter was or wasn’t going to do about it. All that was left of that story was how fortunate Miriam could feel in retrospect that she’d gotten so little of Porter’s clothing off. Even knowing Rose had seen nothing, Miriam had time for the stray, absurd thought: Abraham Lincoln wouldn’t have been circumcised either, so Rose couldn’t object to that, could she?

“Should I call the police?”

“No, Mother.”

“
No, Mother
what?” Rose seized any occasion for a mental test, a verbal duel—why miss what was there for the taking?

“Don’t overreact, Rose, for God’s sake.”

The room flooded with light from the living room and foyer behind Rose, every lamp switched on, as though her mother had been awake for a duration of eavesdropping and pacing, and for expert selection of the awkwardest instant to make this confrontation, though truly she’d have had a few to choose from.

“Don’t tell me how I should react. Don’t tell me what to do. If I don’t call the police it’s less a mercy than the fear they might arrest me for parental dereliction.” Rose’s bold, rising, theatrically superb declaration ran over a thin, husky, stuttering sound, something that
might have been an effort on Porter’s part to apologize or introduce himself or both, even as he juggled his glasses back onto his face and pinched at his zipper and disordered trousers. Rose detoured to a Barbara Stanwyckian quip: “By the way, it’s rape, mister, unless you happen still to be in high school yourself.”

“Nobody was
raped
,” said Miriam, letting her disappointment color the word with scorn for Rose and Porter both. “And I’m not in high school, thank you.”

“You ought to be. This matter of skipping a grade makes you think you’re a
woman
now? The bosom on you fooled this young man, fair enough, but how can it have fooled you as well? Perhaps you’re ready to become parents of a child. It’s not as much pleasure as you’d think from the way it begins, making babies.”

“Nobody’s making any babies.” Miriam thought of the word
pessary
again. So long as Porter was present this scene was only comic overture to the crisis, the explosion struggling to begin. It wasn’t that Porter wasn’t capable of defending Miriam from Rose, or not only. It was that Rose wouldn’t unleash what she had, so Miriam couldn’t know what she faced and had to defend against, until Porter had been shunted off.

Instead Rose was left playing to some invisible distant gallery of those she imagined might judge her through Porter’s eyes: goyim, males, New York intellectuals, strangers generally. So while he stood gaping at her, a hand raised as if he really thought his own contribution would be expected at some point, Rose speechified, rehearsing various guilt-drenched postures. Miriam knew that for all its apparent force Rose’s monologue was a placeholder, a form of stalling. “I tried to raise a young woman but apparently produced an American teenager in her place. No doubt the fault is mine, yet it’s also the case that the result was sabotaged a hundred ways. First by the father, who couldn’t be kept at home. In that the fault is surely mine, we fought terribly, I couldn’t keep him fascinated in ways a freethinker like you appears to have already mastered, but what you two lovebirds couldn’t imagine is the world I brought this girl into. A battlefield. Not a playground for children in the bodies of adults. You’re in a hurry to grow up—we’d given up our childhoods before we knew we’d given them up. I slaved in the back of my father’s candy shop. This one, Miriam,
ah! Look at the expression! He wouldn’t know what a barrel of halvah was if I shoved it in his face.”

Halvah! Oh, an intervention was desperately needed, but the difficulty was in how little offense Porter gave, how few grounds for ejection. He stood dopily awaiting his turn, which would never come. As she’d wished for a little more rape earlier, Miriam now wished Porter would make some move, any move, even in panic, to incite Rose showing him the door. Instead Rose, measuring his passivity, latched onto a listener. Miriam couldn’t count how many she’d seen frozen on a square of sidewalk at one of Rose’s stunning harangues, though she’d never been draped naked in a bedspread while a would-be boyfriend played the part. Maybe Porter was about to begin taking notes as if at Trilling’s own feet. Miriam had to do everything herself. She elevated from the bed like a ghost or a muse in her drapery and took Porter’s elbow and guided him past a momentarily jaw-frozen Rose, back through the kitchen. Though Porter was apparently properly dressed, he moved as awkwardly as if he wore his jacket backward, his shoes on his hands.

“Go.”

“I’m so sorry. When can I—?”

When can I what?
Miriam thought, an exact Rose Angrush Zimmer cadence, except Rose would have said it aloud. What in this performance was Porter eager to reflect on or repeat? Well, they’d find each other soon enough, that’s if Miriam ever got out of the house again. She craned on tiptoe for a quick kiss, surprising herself by wanting one. She’d after all fondled Porter’s secret heartbeat, collected his private sigh. They had, after all, been romancing across a connect-the-dot map of Miriam’s city for hours past, hours of what now seemed another night, another life entirely.

The light in the Gardens was morning light. Carl Heuman stood dumbfounded on the lane, sad in a Dodgers jacket that made him look fourteen years old, commemorating or denying the fact of his absconded team, and presumably interrupted in his morning meander to an early-Sunday baseball practice on the diamond of Sunnyside High, where Miriam had polished off her senior classes a year before Carl and her other contemporaries. So Carl Heuman had seen her in her bedspread, shoving the Columbia boy through the kitchen door’s
gap. It didn’t matter. Yet, their eyes meeting for an instant, Miriam now experienced a time-stopped revelation, wholly involuntary: If she died today (why think
this
, to begin with?), Carl Heuman would have known her a hundred, perhaps a thousand times better than Porter had. Just by virtue of knowing Sunnyside Gardens and what they signified, by knowing Rose Zimmer the way any one of their neighbors would have (the boys like Carl Heuman were all terrified of Rose), by being enrolled in the same classes Miriam had evaded, by being from and of these places, forlorn Carl Heuman, whose only living purpose was to become the third-ever Jewish pitcher on a team that
no longer existed
, bore incisive knowledge of who it was Miriam had not yet even begun to escape being, even if he couldn’t know he knew it. Porter, on the other hand, could be from Mars for what he grasped of the creature with whom he’d passed the night. Miriam might be altering herself at a furious rate into that other one, the girl Porter believed he’d deviously squired out of the basement club behind the stalking horse of her official date, then halfway across the Brooklyn Bridge and back, then to Queens to find himself more or less raped and accused of rape within a span of minutes, but she wasn’t there yet. Miriam was still the one into whose soul dopey, obedient Carl Heuman so effortlessly, if abashedly, gazed. And so, as first Carl and then Porter wobbled along the light-blobbed lanes of the Gardens and vanished, Miriam closed the kitchen door and withdrew to face Rose.

Last Sunday morning, Lord, Lord, Lord / Oh, my daddy went a hunting, Lord, Lord, Lord
.

Rose, who reason would suggest might have taken the interval for a chance to invite morning into the apartment, had apparently done the reverse, cinched whatever window shades allowed any margin of daylight, the better to savor the reproving atmosphere of night. She’d then withdrawn to her own bedroom, the darkest room in the apartment. A withdrawal, but not a retreat; she’d left the door open, less invitation than command that Miriam deliver herself into Rose’s sanctum.

Of course Rose had an excuse, if Miriam could read her mind (she could), for shuttering the apartment: that of shame at a daughter’s nudity cloaked in merely a bedspread. No, Rose’s next move might have been spontaneous, not a plan, the drawn shades were no evidence
of forethought. Miriam had to grant Rose’s instinct for improvised spectacles. This one was certainly special. Rose tore at the sash of her robe, tore it open, flung it to the floor at her feet. Then clawed again, at the filmy nightdress beneath, rending the cloth where it held her vast, soft, pale-yellow, mole-strewn breasts so they tumbled out, absurd offering, absurd accusation.

“I’d tear my heart out and drop it on the floor if I could, to let you see what you’ve done to it. Instead take a look at the body that not only labored you forth but nursed you and bathed you and in order to keep you fed and in clothes allowed itself to be destroyed walking half a mile in shoes with heels every day to the pickle factory because Solomon Real preferred ladies to appear like ladies even while up to their armpits in his brine. Hardly a pretty sight, is it? I’m no Botticelli like you, a sylph in a stinking blanket.” So began the real monologue, the real test. Miriam consoled herself thinking these were essay questions in reverse: Rose wasn’t really interested in answers, just that Miriam meditate on her epic inquisitions. Miriam need only find a way to endure her mother, posture herself to survive but not submit, until Rose’s forces were exhausted.

A first jab Miriam couldn’t resist, though she knew she shouldn’t jab. “I thought you were the bookkeeper—the brains of Sol’s operation.”

“In the early years I was side by side with the workers soaking in that piss. That I was the only one who could answer a phone in proper English or add a column of numbers accurately didn’t put me one step above the delivery boys or for that matter the horses dragging the carts. All so you could have the opportunity to attend the finest public university in the world, a privilege the historical rarity of which you couldn’t be expected to understand since you’ve neglected every chance of learning the way the world works, the way the present world, rather than coming into being unprecedented, is in fact a product of history. You’d rather learn the way a man’s schlong works, seemingly. You’d rather attend the college of sexual intercourse!” Rose’s speckled chest was aflame with rage and inspiration, a blush creeping to those breasts barely covered and jostling obscenely for her punctuation. They now appeared scalded, pink moons in the darkened bedroom. Rose detected their bobbing herself and seized them with her hands, enlisted them in her tableau. “Here’s your result, it’s
staring you in the face if you hadn’t noticed. He sticks it in you and you become bloated with a child, your body is warped into a battlefield, then enslaved in servitude, the reward for which is a daughter who’ll declare herself done with college at seventeen years of age. A finished product, it seems. Look at you!”

If Rose was the Red Queen and Miriam Alice, then Miriam’s desired chess move would be to avoid at all costs the squares Rose had titled, absurdly,
intercourse
and
pregnancy
. The nearer to matters of the female body, two examples of which were combustively present between them at this instant, the more irrational (if degrees of
rationality
could even be invoked in this asylum atmosphere), the more combustible Rose would certainly become. No, Miriam had to leap at what looked like possible exits from this territory: Jump to the square marked
college education
. Matters of the mind. Get Rose thinking in abstractions—the illuminations of Marxism, the betrayals of Stalinism and horrors of Hitlerism, the mercy of Lincolnism, the splendors of American freedom, the rapture of public libraries or honest policemen or Negroes and whites together enjoying Central Park—and Miriam might be halfway home. And, while at it, dress one of those two combustible female bodies, the one Miriam had the power to dress. Let Rose be naked, if she so chose.

Therefore even as Miriam began to speak in what she hoped were soothingly reasonable tones, she backed in her Statue of Liberty bedspread out of Rose’s bedroom and began groping in her chest of drawers for the rudiments of a fresh outfit. “Mother, I know it’s a terrific system but you have to realize that Queens College isn’t exactly the same as the Manhattan campus. For me it’s like being stuck with the same faces from high school.”

“The sons and daughters of other good working-class families to which you’re ashamed to admit you belong among?”

“I’m not alone, Rose. It’s only the squares who aren’t rushing over to MacDougal Street the minute class is over. I learn more in one bull session in Washington Square Park than I ever did at Queens College.”

“Ah, only
squares
? Listen to you. Despite the beatnik talk I don’t miss your implication for the rest of us. What licenses you to judge so severely?”

“You’re telling me you don’t sort the world into those with and without a clue, Rose? Would you prefer if I used your word—
sheep
?”

“So these sophisticates flee the minute class is over, yet
you’re
the one who couldn’t wait even that long. By destroying your studies you’ve squandered your option to transfer to City, if you’re so eager to be away from me, and travel to Harlem to get into the company of the big obnoxious Jews up there. You need a famous atmosphere or you’re bored, is that it?” Rose, her robe now tightened again around the ruined nightdress, had followed Miriam to her doorway. She seemed magically calmed, if it was safe to believe it could happen so quickly.