The Tell Read online

  Malconson was a tall man. Eva, an expert seamstress, was able to estimate yardage by simply looking at the fabric. She would tell you that Malconson was five feet ten or eleven. An inch here or an inch there didn’t matter; Eva was happy to have a man she could look up to. There was little about Malconson she didn’t admire. His temperament was in the sweetness of his face. When he smiled at her, he poured honey on her heart. He was a neat dresser. He dressed for the weekly poker game as if he were going to the Berditch-ever Society’s annual meeting. He wore a suit with a vest and shoes that were polished like a soldier’s. Eva wanted to think he dressed especially for her, but she knew that Malconson dressed for himself. Tessie, who referenced the movies the way other people quoted the Bible, once told her that Mr. Malconson looked like Joseph Cotton. Eva didn’t know from Joseph Cotton, but if Tessie said it, then Malconson looked like a movie star.

  Molly, Malconson’s wife, took no notice of the flirtation, and Harry—well, Harry wouldn’t have cared. It was only God Eva worried about. She feared that her desire was tantamount to adultery and that to ask for forgiveness for a sin she intended to repeat only compounded the evil. But it was the spring, and Yom Kippur wasn’t until September. Eva, knowing how to turn a deaf ear, even to her own voice, silenced her guilt and continued preparing for the poker game.

  The jelly jars and the empty glasses from the memorial candles that served as everyday ware she stowed under the sink. She threw out the tea bags sitting in cups on the counter, even if they’d only been used once. She filled the crystal candy dish with nuts and dates, and she polished the top of the Formica kitchen table as if it were marble. All this she did with the anticipated pleasure of seeing herself, if only for a few minutes, in the mirror of Malconson’s gaze.

  Eva heard the doorbell and looked at the clock. It was too early for the poker. Tessie walked into the kitchen with a bouquet of white lilies.

  “Vos iz dos?” she asked in Yiddish.

  “English, Mama,” Tessie corrected. “They’re flowers.”

  “So nu, I should think they’re tomatoes?”

  “Mama!”

  “They look like the flowers from a goyisher funeral. The Christians do the flowers. They throw them on the graves. If you ask me, it’s a waste.”

  “Ma, these are not from a funeral.”

  “So, where then?”

  “From somebody I met, okay?”

  Lately Tessie had become increasingly exasperated with her mother. Eva was different with Tessie. With the other children, she’d rather not see, but with Tessie she was afraid not to look. Tessie had enjoyed being special, but her mother’s vigilance had become an impediment to her pleasures. She was getting tired of explaining herself.

  Where she was going? What she was wearing? Who she was going with? When was she coming back?

  “Ma,” she complained, “why are you always asking me and not Ethel or my brothers?”

  “Y is a crooked letter,” Eva said, having learned from Tessie how to defend herself against a good question with a non-answer.

  In truth there were three good answers to Tessie’s question: one was Eva’s guilt, one was unspeakable, and the other was obvious to anyone who saw Tessie. Tessie, with her blonde hair and face like a chiseled cameo, did not look like any other member of Eva’s family. Tessie looked like a Christian, a shikseh, and everybody knew about Jewish men and shiksehs—they bedded shiksehs and married Jews. Tessie looked like she’d been born in Sweden or Norway or one of those blonde countries that Eva would never visit. When Tessie was a baby—and this Eva will never forget—the yentas in the neighborhood started a rumor. They stood under her kitchen window and whispered their envy. “She’s adopted,” they said. “How else would you explain?” they muttered. The rumor started to spread the way milk starts to sour. It made no sense that Eva, already with two mouths to feed, another on the way, and doing piecework in her in-laws’ factory, would adopt a baby, but then again when you looked at Tessie, it made no sense that she belonged to Eva.

  Tessie grew up hearing the rumors of her adoption. She was secretly pleased. She could imagine herself a Swedish actress—not Greta Garbo, everyone wanted to be Garbo. No, she preferred to think of herself as an actress like Bergman, a little less flash, a little more substance. She valued elegance over glamour. If you asked Tessie how she knew the difference, she couldn’t tell you, but truth be told, she got it from Eva.

  Even though she looked older than her age, there was elegance about Eva. With her head held high and her spine straight like a pillar, she projected an air of confidence. This she got from her own mother. Eva’s mother had told her that when the Cossacks came to the shtetl, and the Jews started to run, it was the one that looked weak that got killed first. And so Eva learned that fear can look like confidence, and confidence can look like elegance. To the ladies on Schenck Avenue, confidence looked like arrogance. Eva didn’t care—she protected her posture the way a sheep protects a lamb. She never sat on a soft chair. She never dressed without a steel-boned corset. Had Tessie thought to look, she might have seen that it was Eva, not Bergman, who deserved her praise, but, at the moment, all she could see was her own reflection, and all she could hear were her own ruminating thoughts of Gerry, the guy from the Amboy Dukes, and the flowers in her hand.

  “Mama, where’s a vase? I need to put these in water or they’ll wilt.” Eva grudgingly nodded towards the upper cupboard.

  “Behind the Passover dishes. There’s only one. Be careful. It’s all the way in the back. Don’t knock the dishes.”

  “I won’t knock them. You think I can’t even take down a vase without breaking a dish? You think I can’t do anything?”

  Eva wasn’t sure what Tessie could do. She could look in the mirror—that’s what Tessie could do.

  As Tessie’s exasperation with Eva rose, so did Eva’s exasperation with Tessie. Like dough without yeast, Tessie sat on her toches and would not get up and get a job. Finally, whether it was Eva’s nagging or Tessie’s inability to resist anything that had “beauty” in the title, she went to work at Rosa’s Beauty Salon around the corner. On Monday morning Tessie got up and put on the pink uniform. On Monday evening she came home wearing a slip. Eva took one look at her daughter and turned her back.

  “Why, Ma? What are you looking away? You didn’t even hear.”

  “Yeah, so tell me. Tell me, Tessela. Tell me, where is the uniform?”

  Tessie told Eva that Mrs. Hernandez came in, and she had nits. Eva said Tessie had excuses. Eva said you don’t quit one job until you have another. Tessie, who loved to star in her own drama, opened her eyes wide, dropped her jaw and shook her head in feigned disbelief.

  “I cannot believe … I cannot believe that my own mother would want me to wash dirty Puerto Rican heads.”

  Eva reminded her daughter that Mrs. Hernandez was an immigrant just like her mother.

  “You never had nits, Mama!” Tessie said, but Eva wasn’t so sure. When she was fourteen and got off the boat at Ellis Island, she might have had nits. Her head itched. Her skin crawled. The guards asked her name, gave her soap and told her to take a shower. It could be she had nits.

  “You want me to get nits, Mama?” Tessie whined.

  “I want you should work,” Eva countered. “You quit school. You quit work. So what you gonna do with your time? You like to dress fancy like a movie star. So who’s gonna pay … your father?” And here is where Eva shut her mouth and bit her tongue in a show of respect for the disrespected. What was she supposed to tell her daughter? That it was indolence, not illness, that kept her father home all day?

  Tessie, out of respect for her mother, also honored the family code of silence and did not tell Eva that she was determined not to spend her life wiping noses, washing floors, and catering to a man who stood at the sink demanding that his wife get up and get him a glass of water. Besides, Tessie thought she was already working. In the same way Gerry was in pursuit of the buck, Tessie was in pursuit of the guy wi
th the buck. It was a full-time job—clothes, makeup, attitude—it all took work. If she told this to Eva, Eva would say that her daughter didn’t have to be adopted to be a shikseh.

  Tessie, tired of arguing with her mother about the job at Rosa’s, decided to enlist her father in her cause. She knew that Harry, with so few muscles to flex, would grab at the opportunity to shake a fist at his wife.

  Eva was one story, and Harry was another, and together they were a third. If you looked at their wedding picture, you would see that Harry was a plain-looking man. Had he been bad-looking, he would have stood out, but Harry had the misfortune of the nondescript, and unless he was disruptive, he was unseen. In his wedding picture, he perches on the arm of a chair in a top hat and tails, his arm loosely around Eva’s shoulder. He appears to be looking at nothing. Eva sits in a chair below him. A lace veil crowns her face like a shroud. Her expression is one of resignation. Her eyes look as if she is saying goodbye.

  Harry had had a brief interlude of productivity after he married Eva, but then the promise of the future became history, and Harry opted for a premature retirement. Day in and day out, he sat on a hard chair by the window, staring at the brick wall across the alley. He no longer looked like the man Eva married. As he lost substance, he lost weight. Like a tight glove, the skin stretched over the bones of his face, sinking his cheeks and making the hook in his nose all the more prominent. Beaked like an eagle, he could now express his contempt without having to bend his head.

  Each morning Harry dressed as if he still had somewhere to go. He put on the slacks to his brown suit and a white shirt with a stiff collar. He hiked up the sleeves with black elastic armbands to protect the cuffs. He buttoned the vest, tucked in the pocket watch, and adjusted the gold chain. Before he left the bedroom, he moved the picture of Eva’s parents out of the way to take a last look at himself in the bureau mirror. Harry did not see the character in his face. What Harry saw was what Harry wanted to see—a man who dressed for the office.

  Having made the impression on himself that he would like to have made on others, he walked the twenty feet into the kitchen, sat down at the table, and silently waited for Eva to serve him his breakfast.

  It irritated Eva to watch Harry eat. He picked at his food like a pigeon pecked at a crumb—a wedge of toast with a little bit of marmalade, sometimes half a bowl of farina—and then he’d sip the coffee through the sugar cube between his teeth. When he was done, he pushed the plate away and left the table. Eva said what a Jewish wife is supposed to say.

  “Harry, where you goin’? You eat like a bird. No wonder you don’t feel well. Sit down, I’ll make you some eggs.” Harry brushed her away, turned his back, walked into the living room, and took up his chair.

  Harry didn’t have to sit on a hard chair. He could have sat on the sofa. It had down cushions. He was thin. He was bony. The sofa would have been easier on his toches, but the sofa had flowers, and Harry didn’t like flowers. He could have sat in the green armchair, a little frayed but not too bad. It had a standing lamp behind it with a fringe shade and a good bulb. He could have seen to read his paper instead of having to turn it this way and that to catch the light at the window. But there was no talking to Harry. Harry would do whatever he wanted, even if there was nothing he wanted to do. Do not assume he was like Eva. Harry did not choose the hard chair to preserve his posture—his posture, like his stature, was long gone. No, Harry chose the hard chair because for him discomfort was protest, and one way or another, Harry was determined to speak his mind.

  While he sat, he smoked Chesterfields. He lit one with the end of another. His fingers, like chicken feet, were yellow from nicotine. He wasn’t yet fifty, but he hacked like an old man, and the coughs bent him over. The cigarettes dangled from his lip. Unnoticed, the ash would grow and fall. Small pinholes pocked the carpet in front of Harry’s chair. It’s hard to say if it was the carpet or the hacking that made Eva crazy, but at least once a day, in broken Yiddish, she would take up her lines and shout into thin air, “You’re killing yourself. What the matter with you? Listen to that cough. Meshugha! Smoke and cough. Smoke and cough.”

  Harry smiled. Eva’s litany was proof that he had not lost the capacity to irritate. He’d be damned if he’d stop smoking. Ten years later Eva was right, and Harry was damned. They said it was gallbladder, but Eva knew it was defiance that killed him, and that Harry had spent the last fifteen years sitting his own shiva.

  Harry’s death was a shandeh, a shame. He should have walked like a peacock; after all, he was the son of an entrepreneur. This was the selling point Eva’s relatives used to get her to say “yes” to his proposal. They didn’t think she was getting a bad deal, but it wasn’t Eva’s happiness they were after, it was a little more space in the tenement apartment. Three rooms, one bathroom down the hall, and eight people. Eva was the last to come, and they thought she should be the first to go, so when Harry proposed and Eva didn’t want to budge, they looked at her like she was crazy. Each morning at six before she left for work, and each evening at eight when she came home, her aunt Rifka would start, her uncle Moishe would follow, and her three cousins would echo. Like a chorus they sang, “Oy, Eva, you’re gonna argue? What does she expect, the King of England? You’re a greenhorn. He’s the son of an entrepreneur. Harry Stone is the son of an entrepreneur. Harry Stone is the son of an entrepreneur.” Eva, unlike Harry, was unable to protest. She packed her dreams in her suitcase, walked down the aisle and took the oath of servitude.

  But why Harry picked Eva is a very good question. Maybe because Sol and Bessie, Harry’s parents, sang the same song the other way. They sang, “Oy, Harry what’s the matter with you? You’re the son of an entrepreneur. Why you gonna marry a greener? What you think, she’s the Queen of Sheba? You’re the son of an entrepreneur. You’re the son of an entrepreneur.”

  For Harry, whatever Sol and Bessie didn’t want was the very least that he could do. He went to Goldstein, the jeweler, picked out a ring—not too big, not too small—Eva stuck out her finger, Harry slid it on, and that was that.

  The Stone & Sons dry goods store, a hole in the wall on the corner of Schenck and New Lots, became a two-thousand-foot shop on Pitkin and then a five-thousand-foot factory downtown on Atlantic Avenue. When Harry’s older brother, Morris, left the business to work for Bulova Watch in New York City, Sol dropped & Sons, and the name became Stone Lingerie. Harry began to worry whether he was being phased out of the business. Harry wanted to sit where his father sat—in an office, in a suit, by a phone, with a desk. Harry hated being on the dirty floor, listening all day to the clacking of the sewing machines. He wanted to come home clean instead of covered in lint. When Harry asked his father how come he didn’t just take off the s and leave the Son, Sol raised himself to his full five-feet-two height, balanced on his toes, and shouted, “What you care what we call it? Your brother quit, so someday I’ll retire, and he’ll get nothin’, and you’ll get everything. Your job is to make sure every pair of bloomers, every slip that leaves this factory, is worth my name. That’s your job. You hear me, Harry? That’s your job.”

  Harry heard, but he didn’t answer. What was he going to say to his father: I want you should be dead so I can sit in your chair? He went back on the floor and watched the girls—making sure they sewed the seams straight, put the darts where the pattern showed, and didn’t skimp on the lace. Like a Jew prays for the Messiah, Harry prayed for the “someday.”

  “Someday” never came. Sol never left. Maybe he kept waiting for the prodigal son to quit Bulova and come back where he belonged. But when Harry realized that Sol had no plans to retire, Harry got sick so he could get out. He came home one Friday night, sat down at the table, sipped a little soup with a matzah ball, and said he couldn’t swallow it anymore. Eva tried to get him to take some mineral oil. Harry pushed it away and told Eva to pour him some schnapps. Eva said the whiskey would burn. Harry told her to pour the schnapps. The next morning, he got up, took a chair from the kitchen,
put it by the living room window, sat down, and waited fifteen years to digest what he couldn’t swallow.

  Tessie stood in front of her father and waited for the smoke to clear so she could get his attention. When she told Harry about Rosa’s, she watched her father’s indignation rise like a flush. He went running into the kitchen and in broken Yiddish he yelled at his wife. “No daughter of mine is going to wash the head of a dirty spic. What’s the matter with you? You crazy? You meshuganah?”

  Eva shut her ears and calmed herself with thoughts of Malconson. Harry, satisfied that he had made his point, went back to his chair in the living room. Tessie left Eva in the kitchen and went into her bedroom, avoiding her sister Ethel and her annoying questions. She needed to pick out an outfit, hoping for a date with Gerry.

  Pauline and Louis

  when they were eight

  Gerry took Tessie to Enrico’s to impress her. The linen tablecloths and the china dishes, he thought, would make the evening.

  “Should I call you George or Gerry?” Tessie asked.

  “Gerry! Except to my sister, I’m not George no more. There’s a story about me and my sister, but it’s too long.

  “We’ve got time, right? Tell your story.”

  Tessie shook out her napkin, classy-like, and laid it in her lap.

  Back in 1926, the year his father Louie died, his mother Pauline had an apartment on Linden Boulevard on the fourth floor of a six-floor building. It was a railroad flat. Rooms jutted off a long, narrow hall like legs off a centipede. The floors in the building had white mosaic tiles with a black, Greek-key border, an attempt at elegance by the builders but unappreciated by the tenants. Who could see the floors? The stairs were narrow and the landings crowded. Pauline kept telling her friend Gertie to take the baby carriage off the landing. She was going to break her neck going up and down these God-damned steps. Gertie said Pauline should come into her apartment and tell her where to put it. Pauline wanted to tell her where to put it, but Louie told her to be nice, so Pauline just gave Gertie a look and kept climbing.